LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap tl\L5-CL^a 

Shelf .... MA'ktt 




UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



The Errors of Prohibition. 



AN ARGUMENT 



DELIVERED IN THE 



KEPEESENTAT1VES' HALL, BOSTON, 



APRIL 3, 1867, 



JOINT SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE GENERAL 
COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



i 




£ 

V 



Br JOHN A. ANDREW. 



BOSTON: 

J. A, BUTLER, 62 SUDBURY ST. 

1874. 



INTRODUCTORY, 



At the present annual session of the General Court of Massa- 
chusetts, commencing in January, 1867, petitions were presented 
by Alpheus Hardy and others, praying for enactment of a judicious 
license law for the regulation and control of the sale of spirituous 
and fermented liquors in the Commonwealth. The number of these 
Petitioners during the session already (April, 1867,) comprises 
thirty thousand legal voters, and is increasing daity. 

A petition was also presented by the principal inn-keepers in 
the city of Boston, praying for such changes in existing laws con- 
cerning the sale of wines and liquors as shall allow them to sup- 
ply the wants of the guests of their houses, yet under such excise 
and regulation and subject to such supervision as shall be deemed 
needful for the public good. 

A further petition was presented by the officers and trustees of 
the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, representing that under 
the present statutes it is impossible legally to conduct that business 
and perform its duties to the medical profession and the sick, and 
pra} T ing for such amendment of the law as that apothecaries may 
be enabled to conduct their business in a legal manner. 

Various petitions, numerously signed, were also presented to the 
General Court, 1 emonstrating against any amendment of the ex- 
isting prohibitory statutes. 

All these petitions were referred to a Joint Special Committee 
of the two branches of the legislature, composed of 

Messrs. Morse, of Norfolk, 

Alexander, of Hampden, 
Fay, of Suffolk, 



Messes. Dow, of Middlesex, 

Swan, of Bristol, 

On the part of the Senate; and 
Messrs. Jewell, of Boston,. 

Aldrich, of Worcester, 

Sherman, of Lowell, 

Wright, of Lawrence, 

Avery, of Braintree, 

Flinn, of Chatham, 

McClellan, of Grafton, 

Bartlett, of Roxbury, 

Madden, of Boston, 
On the part of the House of Representatives. 

The Petitioners were represented before the Committee by Hon. 
John A. Andrew and Hon. Linus Child, as counsel; and the Re- 
monstrants were in like manner represented before the Committee 
by Hon. Asahel Huntington, Rev. A. A. Miner, D. D., and William 
B. Spooner, Esq., as counsel. 

The hearings were continued for four days in each week (besides 
two evening sessions,) beginning February 19th, and ending April 
3d, at first in the Senate Chamber, and afterwards in the Repre- 
sentatives' Hall, in the State House at Boston. 

The opening argument for the Petitioners was made by Hon. 
Linus Child, and the following witnesses were called, sworn and 
examined in their behalf: — 

John Q. Adams, Esq., of Quincy, 
(Trial Justice for Norfolk County.) 

Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D.D., of Boston. 
Prof. Louis Agassiz, of Cambridge, 

(Prof, of Zoology and Geology in the Scientific School of Harvard College.) 

Rev. William R. Alger, of Boston. 

Joseph Andrews, Esq., of Boston. ♦ 

Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D., of New Haven, Conn., 
(Professor of Didactic Theology in Yale College.) 

Rev. Charles F. Barnard, of Boston. 



Dr. George F. Bigelow, of Boston, 

(Secretary of the Howard Benevolent Association, and Physician at the 
Washingtonian Home.) 

Prof. Henry J. Bigelow, M. D., of Boston, 

(Professor of Surgery in the Medical School of Harvard College.) 

Hon. Henry W. Bishop, of Lenox, 

(Ex-Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. ) 

Rev. George "W. Bladgen, D. D., of Boston, 
(Senior Pastor of the Old South Church.) 

Hon. J. C. Blaisdell, of Fall River. 
Rev. John A. Bolles, D. D., of Boston, 
(Rector of the Church of the Advent.) 

Prof. Francis Bowen, of Cambridge, 

(Alford Professor of Natural Theology, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity 
in Harvard College.) 

Rev. Robert Brady, of Boston, 
(Pastor of St. Mary's Church.) 

Augustus O. Brewster, Esq., of Boston, 

(Ex- Assistant District-Attorney for Suffolk County.) 

A. M. Brownell, Esq., of New Bedford, 
(Municipal Marshal of that city. ) 

Hon. E. P. Buffington, of Fall River, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Brigadier-General Isaac S. Burrell, of Roxbury, 
(Ex-Municipal Marshal of that city,) 

Rev. B. F. Clark, of Chelmsford. 

Prof. Edward H. Clarke, M. D., of Boston, 

(Professor of Materia Medica in the Medical School of Harvard College ) 

Hon. John H. Clifford, of New Bedford, 

(Ex-Governor and Ex- Attorney-General of the Commonwealth.) 

John C. Cluer, Esq., of Boston. 

Hon. Charles G. Davis, of Plymouth. 

E. Hasket Derby, Esq., of Boston. 

Rev. Manassas Doherty, of Cambridge. 

Hon. J. H. Duncan, of Haverhill. 

Right Rev. Manton Eastburn, D. D., of Boston, 

(Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Massachusetts.) 

Frank Edson, Esq., of Hadley, 

(Chairman of the Selectmen and Liquor Agent of that town.) 



G 



Rev. Theodore Edson, D. D., ot Lowell. 

Rev. George E. Ellis, D. D , of Charlestown. 

Rev. Rufus Ellis, of Boston. 

M. J. Fassin, Esq., of New York. 

Hon. Francis B. Fay, of Lancaster, 

(Ex-Mayx>r of Chelsea, and Trustee of the State Reform School for Girls at 
Lancaster.) 

Hon. Henry F. French, of Cambridge, 

(Ex-Assistant-District-Attorney for Suffolk County.) 

Addison Gage, Esq , of West Cambridge. N 

Thomas Gaffield, Esq., of Boston. 
Hon. E. B. Gillette, of Westfield, 

(District-Attorney for the Western District.) 

Albert G. Goodwin, Esq., 

(Secretary of the Boston Provident Association.) 

Hon. Alpheus Hardy, of Boston. 
Benjamin W. Harris, Esq., of Milton, 

(Ex-District- Attorney for the South-Eastern District.) 

Rev. Michael Hartney, of Salem. 
Rev. George F. Haskins, of Boston, 

(Head of the House of the Angel Guardian.) 

Rev. James A. Healey, of Boston. 

Rev. Frederick H. Hedge, D. D., of Brookline, 

(Prof, of Ecclesiastical History in the Divinity School of Harvard College. 

Henry Hill, Esq., of Braintree. 
Hon. George S. Hillard, of Boston, 

(United States District- Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.) 

Prof. Oliver Wendell Holmes, M. D., of Boston, 

(Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of 
Harvard College.) 

Prof. E. N. Horsford, of Cambridge, 

(Ex-Kumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Art of Life in 
the Scientific School of Harvard College.) 

Oapt. David Hoyt, of Deerfield. 

Rev. G. B. Ide, D. D., of Springfield. 

Prof. Charles T. Jackson, M. D., of Boston. 

Prof. J. B. S. Jackson, M. D., of Boston, , ♦ 

(Shattuck Professor of Morbid Anatomy in the Medical School of Harvard 
College.) 

Rev. Johu Jones, of Pelham. 



Col. John Kurtz, of Boston, 
(Chief of Police of the city.) 

Wm. M. Lathrop, Esq., of Boston. 
Rev. Thomas R. Lambert, of Charlestown. 
Louis Lapham, Esq., of Fall River, 
(Judge of the Police Court of that city.) 

Hon. George Lewis, of Roxbury, 
(Mayor of that city.) 

Hon. D. Waldo Lincoln, of Worcester, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Hon. Frederick W. Lincoln, Jr., of Boston, 
(Ex-Mayor of the city.) 

Rev. Increase S. Lincoln, of Warwick. 
Rev. Samuel K. Lothrop, D. D., of Boston. 
Rev. J. C. Lovejoy, of Cambridge. 
Hon. Alfred Macy, of Nantucket. 
Henry A. Marsh, Esq., of Amherst. 
Samuel F. McCleary, Esq., of Boston, 
(City Clerk.) 

Rev. Lawrence McMahon, of New Bedford. 
Hon. William S. Messervy, of Salem, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Rev. Rollin H. Neale, D. D., of Boston. 
Lyman Nichols, Esq., of Boston. 
Hon. Otis Norcross, of Boston, 
(Mayor of the city.) 

Rev. J. B. O'Hagan, of Boston. 
P. L. Page, Esq., of Pittsfield, 

(Judge of the Police Court of that town.) 

Hon. Henry W. Paine, of Cambridge. 
Hon. John C. Park, of Boston. 
Charles Henry Parker, Esq., of Boston, 

(Manager of the Suffolk Institution for Savings. ) 

Hon. Joel Parker, of Cambridge, 

(Koyall Professor in the Law School of Harvard College; formerly Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New Hampshire.) 

E. B. Patch, Esq., of Lowell. 

Prof. Andrew P. Peabody, D. D., LL. D., of Cambridge, 

(Preacher to the University, and Plummer Professor of Christian Doctrine 
and Morals in Harvard College.) 



Hon. J. H. Perry, of New Bedford, I 

(Mayor of that city.) 

Chase Philbrick, Esq., of Lawrence, 
(Municipal Marshal of that city.) 

Edward L. Pierce, Esq., of Milton, 

(District- Attorney for the South-Eastern District.) 

Rev. John Power, of Worcester. 

Rev. George Putnam, D. D., of Roxbury. 

Hon. George C. Richardson, of Cambridge, 

(Ex-Mayor of that city; President of the Board of Trade of the city of 
Boston.) 

Rev. John P. Robinson, of Boston. 
Hon. Charles Russell, of Princeton. 
Hon. Charles Theodore Russell, of Cambridge, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Hon. George P. Sanger, of Boston, 
(District- Attorney for Suffolk County.) 

Edward A. Savage, Esq., of Boston, 
(Deputy-Chief of Police of the city.) 

Rev. Thomas Shehan, of Taunton. 

J. E. Souchard, Esq., French Consul at Boston. 

Oliver Stackpole, Esq., of Boston. 

Prof. D. Humphreys Storer, M. D., of Boston, 

(Professor of Obstetrics and of Medical Jurisprudence in the Medical 
School of Harvard College. ) 

Rev. Patiick Strain, of Lynn. 
Rev. Edward T. Taylor, D. D., of Boston, 
(Pastor at the Seamen's Bethel in that city.) 

Minot Tirrell, Jr., Esq., of Lynn. 
Rev. John Todd, D. D., of Pittsfield. 
Rev. John E. Todd, of Boston. 
Rev. Joseph Tracy, D. D., of Beverly, 
(Lately Editor of the Boston Recorder.) 

Hon George B. Upton, of Boston. 

Theodore Voelckers, Esq., of Boston. 

Hon. G. Washington Warren, of Charlestown, 

(Judge of the Police Court, and Ex-Mayoi of that city.) , * 

Hon. Emory Washburn, of Cambridge, 

(Bussey Professor in the Law School of Harvard College; Ex-Governor ol 
the Commonwealth; and formerly Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. ) 



9 



Rev. E. M. P. Wells, of Boston, 
(Rector of St. Stephen's Church.) 

Prof. James C. White, M. D., of Boston, 

(Assistant Professor of Chemistry in Harvard College.) 

H. W. B. Wightman, Esq., of Chelmsford, 

(Treasurer of the Chelmsford Foundry Company. ) 

Hon. Joseph M. Wightman, of Boston, 
(Ex-Mayor of the city. ) . 

Rev, Thomas Worcester, D. D., of Boston. 

In support of the petition, of the College of Pharmacy, which 
was represented by Messrs. Thomas Hollis, President, Samuel M. 
Colcord, Vice-President, and Henry W. Lincoln, Recording Secre- 
tary, as a special committee of its Board of Trustees, the follow- 
ing gentlemen appeared as witnesses : — 

Charles Edward Buckingham, M. D M 
(Surgeon of City Hospital, Boston.) 

Charles C. Bixby, of North Bridgewater, 
(Apothecary.) 

Isaac T. Campbell, of Boston, 
(Examiner of Drugs.) 

S. M. Colcord, of Boston, Apothecary, 

(Vice-President of the Massachusets College of Pharmacy.) 

Thomas Hollis, Apothecary, Boston, 

(President of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.) 

James L. Hunt, Apothecary, 
(Town Liquor Agent of Hingham.) 

Henry W. Lincoln, Apothecary, Boston, 

(Recording Secretary of Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.) 

Wm. T. Rand, Dedham, 
(Formerly an Apothecary.) 

Sampson Reed, Druggist, 

(Formerly an Alderman of Boston.) 

Frank W. Simmons, Apothecary, Boston. 

The opening argument for the Remonstrants was then made by 
Hon. Asahel Huntington, who was followed by William B. Spooner, 



10 



Esq., and after the examination of their witnesses, the Rev. A. 
A. Miner, on Tuesday, April 2d, delivered the closing argument 
in their behalf. He was followed, on Wednesday, April 3d, by 
Hon. John A, Andrew, in behalf of the Petitioners, who closed 
the hearing with the following 



ARGUMENT. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee: — 

A measure so extreme and unusual as the statute 
of Massachusetts — prohibiting the sale of spirituous 
and fermented liquors, notwithstanding that they are 
confessedly commercial articles — can rest only on 
some proposition in science or morals of correspond- 
ing sweep. And, although our legislation is not 
entirely consistent in its details with any theory, yet 
it does in fact rest on a theory which involves these 
two positions, viz. : The essentially poisonous charac- 
ter of alcoholic beverages, and The immorality of their 
use. It assumes that any law which permits (and 
regulates) their sale is " immoral and an educator of 
immorality." * 

L 

The advocates of Prohibition base their argument 
in part upon the assumption that alcohol is a poison, 
in the sense in which strychnine or arsenic is poison, 
to be administered to the human system only under 

* Minority Report of 1866, House Document 359, p. 33. 



12 

the restrictions applicable to the administration of 
fatal drugs. 

They affirm this of alcohol taken in whatever 
doses, averring, as it has been concisely expressed 
by another, " that ivhatever is true of the excessive use 
of alcohol is true also in proportionate degree of the 
moderate and occasioned use" Dr. Carpenter, Reg- 
istrar of the University of London, and the leading 
scientific authority with the advocates of prohibition, 
declares in set terms that " The action of Alcohol 
upon the animal body in health is essentially poi- 
sonous" 

Let us therefore at the outset investigate this 
assumption that alcohol is necessarily & poison, with 
an eye to see (in the language of Liebig concern- 
ing tea and coffee, substances akin to, though differ- 
ing somewhat from, alcohol in their working on the 
human frame) "whether it depend on sensual and 
sinful inclinations merely that every people of the 
globe has appropriated some such means of acting 
on the nervous life."* 

Twenty years ago alimentary substances were 
classified by Liebig as Eespiratory Food, and as 
Plastic Food, the line of distinction between them, 
in composition, being the absence or presence of 

* Liebig's Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 456. 



13 

nitrogen, and the line of distinction between them 
in their transformation in the human body, being 
according to Liebig's theory, that though both are 
burned by the inhaled oxygen, yet the former is 
burned directly by it, without previous transforma- 
tion into the human tissues, while part of the latter, 
before final consumption, becomes human tissue. 

Concisely stated, Liebig's two classes of food are, 
therefore, 

I. Certain non-azotized substances, which, from 
their large amount of carbon, serve (as fuel,) to 
keep up the animal heat, and which he names the ele- 
ments of respiration. 

II. Certain nitrogenized substances, which are 
adapted to the formation of blood (out of that, mus- 
cle, and the tissues,) and which he terms tlie plastic 
elements of nutrition. 

Liebig's theory of combustion or oxidation, and 
the sharpness of his distinction between his classes, 
have been modified by recent scientific disputants; 
but his position that alcoholic beverages taken in fit 
combinations, and in due moderation, perform the 
functions of food, remains unshaken. 

He says, — 

" Besides fat and those substances which contain carbon and 
the elements of water, man consumes, in the shape of the alcohol 



14 



of fermented liquors, another substance, which in his body, plays 
exactly the same part as the non-nitrogenized constituents of food. 
14 The alcohol, taken in the form of wine or any other similar 
beverage, disappears in I he body of man. Although the elements 
of alcohol do not possess by themselves the property of combin- 
ing with oxygen at the temperature of the body, and forming car- 
bonic acid and water, yet alcohol acquires, by contact with bodies 
in the condition of eremacausis or absorption of oxygen, such as 
are invariably present in the body, this property to a far higher 
degree than is known to occur in the case of fat and other non- 
nitrogenized substances." * 

ISTot only have many physiologists and chemists 
adopted this general theory, but even those others, 
who modify the theory of Liebig as stated by him- 
self, nevertheless classify alcoholic drinks in the cate- 
gory of foods.f 

In the result which we shall reach concerning 
alcohol, it makes no practical difference whether 
Liebig's division of food stands or falls. If alchohol 
be food, it matters not to the question of a Prohibitory 
Law, whether it be Respiratory Food or Plastic 
Food. 

* Animal Chemistry, 3d edition : London, pp. 97, 98. 

t See, among other authorities, Clinical Medicine, by W. T. Gairdner, 
Physician to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and Lecturer on the Prac- 
tice of Medicine ; and Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical; or, the 
Conditions and Course of the Life of Man, by Prof. John W. Draper, pp. 
27, 28. 

See, also, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, for January 31, 1807, 
which contains a brief account of Dr. Frankland's deductions from his 
own experiments and those of Professors Pick and Wislicenus, concern- 
ing the capacity of non-azotized food to supply power and repair waste* 



15 

Dr. Carpenter himself, admits alcohol, in one 
work,* into the category of foods, classifying it with 
the oleaginous group of foods, although in another 
work,f denouncing it as poison. As Mr. Lewes 
tersely says of him on just this point: — " We have 
only to disentangle his confusion and we find him an 
ally." 

Alcohol contains the carbon and hydrogen which 
belong to the normal elements of the body, and com- 
mon experience in all wine-growing and beer-drink- 
ing countries, and the experience of invalids and 
convalescents everywhere, who are often supported 
almost entirely on alcoholic fluids, show that they 
are assimilated. Therefore (though not proper, un- 
diluted, any more than saltpetre, or oxygen are good 
food by themselves,) it is capable of acting, and does 
act, in certain beverages, as a food. 

That light wines, ale, beer and cider act (when 
moderately used,) as a poison, is contradicted also 
by common experience,, by examples like the life-long 
practice of Oornaro, and the testimony of entire 
nations and successive ages. 

Cornaro from his fortieth year to his death, re- 
stricted himself to a daily allowance of twelve ounces 



* Hainan Physiology, p. 475. 

f Physiology of Temperance and Total Abstinence 



16 

of solid food and fourteen ounces of wine. Of him 
Dr. Carpenter writes:* — 

" The smallest quantity of food upon which life is 
known to have been supported with vigor during a 
prolonged period, is that on which Cornaro states 
himself to have subsisted. This was no more than 
twelve ounces a day chiefly of vegetable matter, with 
fourteen ounces of light wine, for a period of fifty- 
eight years." Born at Venice in 1487, he died at 
Padua in 1568. 

Commenting upon this statement by Dr. Carpen- 
ter, Mr. George Henry Lewes, (author of the Physi- 
ology of Common Life,) says :f — " Observe the pro- 
portion of wine in this diet, and then ask how is it 
in the face of such facts, that Dr. Carpenter can 
deny the nutritive value of alcohol." 

Concerning wine Liebig says: — J 

"Asa restorative, a means of refreshment when the powers of 
life are exhausted, of giving animation and energy where man has 
to struggle with days of sorrow, as a means of correction and com- 
pensation where misproportion occurs in nutrition, wine is surpassed 
by no product of nature or of art. * * * In no part of Ger- 
many do the apothecaries' establishments bring so low a price as 
in the rich cities on the Rhine ; for there wine is the universal 
medicine of the healthy as well as the sick. It is considered 
as milk for the aged." , 

* Human Physiology, p. 387. 

t Westminster Review, No. cxxv., July, 1855. 

% Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 454. 



Pereira writes as follows concerning beer: — 

" Considered dietetically, beer possesses a threefold property : 
it quenches thirst ; it stimulates, cheer, and, if taken in sufficient 
quantity, intoxicates ; lastly, it nourishes or strengthens. * * * 
Beer proves a refreshing and salubrious drink (if taken in mod- 
eration,) and an agreeable and valuable stimulus and support to 
those who have to undergo much bodily fatigue." 

In the article w Diet," in Chambers's Encyclopae- 
dia,* the writer says: — 

'* The laboring man, who can hardly find bread and meat enough 
to preserve the balance/between the formation and decay of his 
tissues, finds in alcohol an agent which, if taken in moderation, 
enables him, without disturbing his health, to dispense with a cer- 
tain quantity of food, and yet keeps up the weight and strength of 
his body." 

Nay, at the close of Dr. Carpenter's work on the 
Physiology of Temperance and Total Abstinence, — 
a work which is the scientific manual of the Prohibi- 
tionists, — occurs the following passage. He is 
arguing upon a thesis which he expresses as follows, 
viz.: that "whilst the habitual use of alcoholic 
liquors, even in the most moderate amount, is likely, 
(except in a few rare cases,) to be injurious, great 
benefit may be derived in the treatment of disease, 
from the medicinal use of alcohol in appropriate 
cases." And he comes finally to speak of " a class 

♦Chambers's Encyclopaedia, Vol. iii., p. 552. Art. Diet. See also the 
Anatomy of Drunkenness, by Dr. Macnish, p. 225. 
2 



18 

of individuals, who," he says, w can scarcely be re- 
garded as subjects of disease, but in whom the con- 
ditions are essentially different from those of health." 
" These are such," he continues, " as, from constitu- 
tional debility, or early habits, or some other cause 
that does not admit of rectification, labor under an 
habitual deficiency of appetite and digestive power, 
even when they are living under circumstances gen- 
erally most favorable to vigor, and when there is no 
indication of disordered action in any organ, all that 
is needed being a slight increase in the capacity for 
preparing the aliment which the body really needs. 
Experience affords ample evidence that there are 
such cases, especially among those engaged in avo- 
cations which involve a good deal of mental activity; 
and that, with the assistance of a small but habitual 
allowance of alcoholic stimulants, a long life of active 
exertion may be sustained, whilst the vital powers 
would speedily fail without their aid, not for the want 
of direct support from them, but for the want of the 
measure of food which the system really needs, and 
which no other means seems so effectual in enabling 
it to appropriate. * * * To withhold the assistance 
of alcoholic stimulants (it is in their very ♦mildest 
form, such as that of bitter ale, that they are most 
beneficial,) would often be to condemn the individu- 



19 

als in question to a life-long debility, incapacitating 
them from all activity of exertion in behalf of them- 
selves or others, and rendering them susceptible to a 
variety of other causes of disease. For it seems to 
be the peculiar character of this condition, that no 
other medicine can supply what is wanting, with the 
same effect as a small quantity of an alcoholic bever- 
age, taken with the principal meal of the day." 

This extract, from Carpenter, leads us to consider 
now, what is a stimulant? It is often alleged against 
alcohol that it is stimulating; that it is even more 
stimulating than almost any other substance in ordi- 
nary use for diet. But what is a stimulant? Is a 
substance intrinsically deleterious for diet because 
it is stimulating? Is it justly a reproach to a man 
that he uses stimulants? Let us not be deceived by 
words. Let us probe this question. And first, for 
a brief, clear, sharp, incisive definition of the term 
"stimulant." This has been well expressed thus: — 

" Stimulants are only energetic stimufo*. Now all 
living acts require stimuli, — the eye light, the egg 
and seed heat or heat and moisture, the stomach 
food, sometimes condiments. It is hard to draw the 
line. Ninon de PEnclos said her soup made her 
tipsy, and convalescents have been said to get drunk 
on a beefsteak. That which is a stimuZws to one 



20 

person is a stimulant to another. The last term 
means only a more concentrated form of stimulus, or 
one which acts more vigorously than ordinary 
stimuli, for any reason in itself or in the person." 

Mr. Lewes, in the " Westminster Review," * sums 
up the question concerning alcohol as a stimulant, 
as follows : — 

" Life is only possible under incessant stimulus. Organic pro- 
cesses depend on incessant change, and this change is dependent 
on stimuli. The stimulus of food, the stimulus of fresh air, the 
stimulus of exercise, are called natural, beneficial ; the stimulus 
of alcohol seems selected for special reprobation without cause 
being shown, except that people choose to say it is not natural. 
How not natural? The phrase can have two significations, and it 
can have but two : first, that alcohol is not a stimulus which man 
employs in a state of nature ; second, it is not consonant with the 
nature of his organism. The second is a pure begging of the ques- 
tion ; and the first is in flat contradiction with experience. * * * 
No nation known to us has ever passed into the inventive condition 
of even rudimentary civilization without discovering, and, having 
discovered, without largely indulging in, the stimulus of alcohol. 
Man discovers fermentation as he discovers the tea-plant and the 
coffee-plant. 

"Of two things, one ; either we must condemn all stimulus, and 
alcohol, because it is a stimulus ; or we must prove that there is 
something peculiar in the alcoholic stimulus which demarcates it 
from all others. Here, again, the reader sees the question nar- 

* Westminster Review, No. cxxv., July, 1855, American edition, pp. 59, 
GO See also the Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 577, by Prof. 
John W. Draper, concerning the use of food by animals, for the force it 
conta'ns. Also the able paper by Dr. Edward Smith, On the Actions of 
Alcohols, printed with the Transactions of the National Association for the 
Promotion of Social Science. London, 1860. 



21 



rowed and brought within an arena of precise debate. Only two 
positions are possible ; indeed, we may say, only one ; for who is 
mad enough to condemn all stimulus? The ground thus cleared, 
the fight narrowed to this one point, let us do justice to the strength 
of our antagonist ; let us confess at once that there is a peculiar- 
ity in alcohol which justifies in some degree its bad reputation, a 
peculiarity upon which all the mischief of intoxication depends ; 
one which causes all the miseries so feelingly laid to its door. And 
what is this peculiarity? Nothing else than the fascination of its 
virtue, the potency of its effect ; were it less alluring, it would not 
lure to excess ; were it less potent, it would not leap into such 
flames of fiery exaltation." 

Prof. J. F. "W". Johnson, in his Chemistry of Com- 
mon Life,* one of the most useful works of that dis- 
tinguished chemist, says : — 

" It is ascertained of ardent spirits, First. That they directly 
warm the bod} r , and, by the changes they undergo in the blood, 
supply a portion of that carbonic acid and watery vapor which, as 
a necessity of life, are constantly being given off by the lungs. 
They so far, therefore, supply the place of food — of the fat and 
starch for example — which we usually eat. Hence a schnapps, in 
Germany, with a slice of lean dried meat, make a mixture like that 
of the starch and gluten in our bread, which is capable of feeding 
the body. So we either add sugar to milk, or take spirits along 
with it, (old man's milk,) for the purpose of adjusting the propor- 
tions of the ingredients more suitably to the constitution, or to the 
circumstances in which it is to be consumed. 

" Second. That they diminish the absolute amount of matter 
usually given off by the lungs and the kidneys. They thus lessen, 
as tea and coffee do, the natural waste of the fat and tissues, 
and they necessarily diminish in an equal degree the quantity of 
ordinary food which is necessary to keep up the weight of the body. 
In other words, they have the property of making a given weight 

* Vol. i., p. 349. 



22 



of food go further in sustaining the strength and bulk of the body. 
And, in addition to the saving of material thus effected, they ease 
and lighten the labor of the digestive organs, which, when the 
stomach is weak, is often a most valuable result. 

" Hence fermented liquors, if otherwise suitable to the constitu- 
tion, exercise a beneficial influence upon old people, and other 
weakly persons whose fat and tissues have begun to waste. * * * 
This lessening in weight or substance is one of the most usual con- 
sequences of the approach of old age. It is a common symptom 
of the decline of life. * * * Weak alcoholic drinks arrest or 
retard, and thus diminish the daily amount of this loss of sub- 
stance. * * * Hence poets have called wine ' the milk of the old,' 
and scientific philosophy owns the propriety of the term. If it does 
not nourish the old so directly as milk nourishes the young, yet it 
certainly does aid in supporting and filling up their failing frames. 
And it is one of the happy consequences of a temperate youth and 
manhood, that this spirituous milk does not fail in its good effects 
when the weight of years begin to press upon us." 

And now, with especial reference to alcohol both 
as food and as stimulus, the latest, and certainly one 
of the ablest, scientific authorities, is the recent work 
on " Stimulants and Narcotics " by Dr. Francis E. 
Anstie, lecturer on Materia Medica and Thera- 
peutics, and formerly on Toxicology, at "West- 
minster. 

Dr. Anstie says : — 

'* If anything deserves the name of a food, assuredly oxygen 
does, for it is the most necessary element in every process of life. 
It is highly suggestive, then, to find that that very same ,quiet and 
perfect action of the vital functions, without undue waste, without 
hurry, without pain, without excessive material growth, is precisely 
what we produce, when we produce any useful effect, by the admin- 



23 



istration of stimulants, though, as might be expected, our artificial 
means are weak and uncertain in their operation, compared with 
the great natural stimulus of life." (p. 145.) 

" A stimulus promotes or restores some natural action, and is 
no more liable to be followed by morbid depression than is the 
revivifying influence of food. And if it be sought to distinguish 
foods by the peculiar characteristic of being transformed in the 
body, then I answer that this is the worst definition of food that 
can be given, since water, which is not transformed in the body at 
all, is nevertheless, the most necessary element of nutrition, seeing 
that human life cannot only not be maintained without it, but may 
subsist for weeks on water as its only pabulum besides the atmos- 
phere and tissues." (p. 149.) 

" Alcohol taken alone or with the addition alone of small quan- 
tities of water, will prolong life greatly beyond the period at which 
it must cease if no nourishment or water only had been given ; 
that in acute diseases it has repeatedly supported not only life, but 
even the bulk of the body during many days of abstinence from 
common foods ; and that, in a few instances, persons have supported 
themselves almost solely on alcohol and inconsiderable quantities 
of water for year*" 

" We may be at a loss to explain the chemistry of its action on 
the body, but we may saf >,ly say that it acts as a food." (p. 13S.) 

" Another grand argument against the propriety of comparing 
stimulants with true foods has alwa} T s been that stimulus is invar i- 
ab y followed by reaction. * * * It is not true that stimulus is of 
itself provocative of subsequent depression ; but there are circum- 
stances in which this might easily appear to be the case. For in- 
stance, when the superabundant mental energy of a man whose 
physical frame is weak, induces him to make violent and continued 
physical efforts, he is apt to find, at the end of a short ' spurt ' 
of exertion, that his energy is exhausted. But here the ex- 
haustion is no recoil from a state of stimulation. * * * And the 
case of drunkenness, that is, of alcoholic narcotism — affords 
another excellent example of the fallacy we are considering. The 
narcotic dose of alcohol, * * * is alone responsible for the symp- 
toms of depressive reaction. Had a merely stimulant dose been 



24 



administered, no depression would have occurred, any more than 
depression results from such a gentle stimulus of the muscular sys- 
tem as is implied in a healthy man taking a walk of three or four 
miles. What depression is there, as an after consequence, of a 
glass or two of wine taken at dinner, or of a glass of beer taken 
at lunch, by a healthy man? What reaction from a teaspoonful of 
sal-volatile swallowed by a person who feels somewhat faint? 
What recoil from the stimulus of heat, applied in a hot bath, or of 
oxygen administered by Marshall Hall's process, to a half-drowned 
man? Absolutely none whatever.'* (pp. 146-7.) 

Doctor Brinton* says in his Treatise on Food and 
Digestion: — 

" From good wine, in moderate quantities, there is no reaction 
whatever. * * * That teetotalism is compatible with health, it 
needs no elaborate facts to establish; but if we take the custom- 
ary life of those constituting the masses of our inhabitants of 
towns, we shall find reason to wait before we assume that this re- 
sult will extend to our population at large. And, in respect to ex- 
perience, it is singular how few healthy teetotallers are to be met 
with in our ordinary inhabitants of cities. Glancing back over the 
many years during which this question has been forced upon the 
author by his professional duties, he may estimate that he has sed- 
ulously examined not less than 50,000 to 70,000 persons, including 
many thousands in perfect health. Wishing, and even expecting 
to find it otherwise, he is obliged to confess that he has hitherto 
met with but very few perfectly healthy middle-aged persons, suc- 
cessfully pursuing any arduous metropolitan calling under teetotal 
habits. On the other hand, he has known many total abstainers, 
whose apparently sound constitutions have given wa} r with unusual 
and frightful rapidity when attacked by a casual sickness." 

The emphasis of this opinion will be more fully 

* Treatise on Food and Digestion, by William Brinton, M. D., F. R. S., 
Thysician to St. Thomas' Hospital. (English.) 



25 

appreciated, if one will but examine Dr. Brinton's 
book " On Diseases of the Stomach," which exhibits 
him in a most cautious and conservative light, in the 
remedial prescription of alcoholic drinks. 

I come now very briefly to consider certain recent 
experiments upon which the prohibitionists mainly 
rely, to control the scientific opinions to which I have 
already alluded. I mean those of MM. Lallemand, 
Perrin, and Duroy. These ingenious French chem- 
ists, after a series of original experiments, supposed 
themselves to have proved that " alcohol is eliminated 
from the organism in totality and in nature" and 
that it " is never transformed, never destroyed in the 
organism" Their conclusion therefore, is, that " alco- 
hol is not food" as a scientific proposition, although 
as matter of practice they do go for light wines. In 
a pamphlet entitled " Is Alcohol Food or Physic," 
which I bought at the rooms of the " Temperance 
Alliance " in Boston, in which these gentlemen are 
upheld as supposed destroyers of the theory of which 
Liebig may be termed the father, I find that their ex- 
periments are contrasted favorably with others, 
because they were made on an empty stomach; and 
that these French experiments are confessedly patho- 
logical, rather than dietetic. The argument drawn 
from them, assumes, in great part, that inferences can 



26 

be fairly drawn from effects produced by narcotic, or 
poisonous doses, (as for instance, the case of a man 
who died thirty-two hours after drinking a pint of 
brandy) , to the case of a person, using with temper- 
ance as a part of his meal, and in due proportion with 
other food, an article of mild drink in which it is 
combined. The same reasoning would in like man- 
ner, justify the argument that, because a decoction 
of green tea, of a given strength, will surely cause 
death, therefore a cup of weak tea taken with supper, 
— containing as it does, a portion of theine, the char- 
acteristic principle of tea, — is a deleterious drink, 
and proportionally poisonous. It also overlooks the 
mysterious subtleties of animal life, and those, still 
more mysterious and elusive, which connect the 
moral with the animal economy. It fails to observe 
the existence of a vital chemistry, some of the phe- 
nomena of which are observable, but whose laws thus 
far defy our capacity for logical definition. It even 
overlooks the varying action of the different alcoholic 
drinks, disclosed in the experiments of Dr. Edward 
Smith; for example, brandy and gin lessening the 
quantity of carbonic acid evolved in respiration, while 
it was increased, on the other hand, by the use of ale, 
and by the use of rum. 

Animal chemistry is in its infancy. The positive 



27 

knowledge on the points undertaken to be so dog- 
matically affirmed, on the strength of those recent 
French experiments, is relatively little; and men of 
science do not concur with their deductions. 

Dr. Anstie, after having discussed and examined 
the many experiments both of Smith and of Lalle- 
mand and his friends, nevertheless declares, in view 
of their facts and those disclosed by the experiments 
of himself and of Baudot and others, his non-concur- 
rence with the Lallemand theory; and, (comparing 
it with aether and chloroform,) he says of alcohol that 
it seems as if it " was intended to be the medicine 
of those ailments which are engendered of the neces- 
sary every day evils of civilized life, and has there- 
fore been made attractive to the senses, and easily 
retained in the tissues, and in various ways approving 
itself to our judgment as a food; while the others, 
which are more rarely needed for their stimulant 
properties, and are chiefly valuable for their benefi- 
cent temporary poisonous action, by the help of 
which painful operations are sustained with impunity, 
are in a great measure deprived of these attractions, 
and of their facilities for entering and remaining in 
the system." * 

* Stimulants and Narcotics, p. 401. 



28 

One of the most able English scientific critics of 
these French experiments further says : — * 

" Dr. Brinton, [in his work on Food and Digestion,] who is by 
no means unreasonably prejudiced in favor of alcohol, has given 
it as the result of his very large experience, that persons who ab- 
stain altogether from alcohol, break down, almost invariably, after 
a certain number of years, if they are constantly employed in any 
severe intellectual or physical labor. Either their minds or their 
bodies give way suddenly, and the mischief once done is very hard 
to repair. This is quite in accordance with what I have myself 
observed, and with what I can gather from other medical men : 
and it speaks volumes concerning the way in which we ought to 
regard alcohol. If, indeed, it be a fact, that in a certain high state 
of civilization men require to take alcohol every day, in some shape 
or other, under penalty of breaking down prematurely in their 
work, it is idle to appeal to a set of imperfect chemical or physi- 
ological experiments, and to decide, on their evidence, that we 
ought to call alcohol a medicine or a poison, but not a food. In 
the name of common sense, why should we retain these ridiculous 
distinctions for any other purpose than to avoid catastrophes? If 
it be well understood that a glass of good wine will relieve a 
man's depression and fatigue sufficiently to enable him to digest his 
dinner, and that a pint of gin taken at once will probably kill him 
stone dead, why haggle about words ? On the part of the medical 
profession, I think I may say that we have long since begun to 
believe that those medicines which really do benefit our patients 
act in one way or another as foods, and that some of the most 
decidedly poisonous substances are those which offer, in the form 
of small doses, the strongest example of a true food action. 

" On the part of alcohol, then, I venture to claim that though 
we all acknowledge it to be a poison, if taken during health in any 
but quite restricted doses, it is also a most valuable medicine-food. 
I am obliged to declare that the chemical evidence is as yet msuf- 

* Cornhill Magazine, No. 33, September, 1862. Art., Does Alcohol act 
as a Food? p. 329. 



29 



ficient to give any complete explanation of its exact manner of 
action upon the system ; but that the practical facts are as striking 
as they could well be, and that there can be no mistake about 
them. And I have thought it proper that, while highly-colored 
statements of the results of the new French researches are being 
somewhat disingenuously placed before the lay public, there should 
not be a total silence on the part of those members of the profes- 
sion who do not see themselves called upon to yield to the mere 
force of agitation." 

And just a dozen years ago, Dr. James Jackson, 
the venerable, beloved, and most eminent Nestor of 
the medical profession in America, bore this public 
testimony concerning the medicinal employment of 
spirits and wines : — 

" I would never order them to one whom I suspected to be de- 
ficient in prudence and self-control. But, keeping these things in 
mind, I have often directed the use even of brandy. In doing this, 
I have been in the habit of saying to the patient, ' If I ever hear 
of your indulging to excess in the use of this, or any similar arti- 
cle, I will call on you and exhort you to stop/ In one instance, 
and only one in the course of a long life, have I been called upon 
to redeem my pledge. This was in the; case of a worthy lady, some 
twenty years after I had directed tue measured use of brandy. At 
my request, she immediately gave up the use of all spirituous 
and fermented liquors, and I have reason to believe that she never 
resumed them. I do not, then, call the risk very great of such 
prescriptions, when made with proper caution. In regard to the 
benefit, in some cases of dyspepsia, and in various other cases, I 
have not any doubt. And, that I may tell the whole, let me say, 
that I have repeatedly seen very great benefit from giving wine to 
young children. The benefit has been particularly marked in some 
children struggling feebly through the period of dentition, and I 
can name some to whom I had made this prescription more than 



30 



forty years ago, among whom not one has shown any peculiar 
fondness for wine in subsequent years. I exhort all young people 
in health not to adopt the practice of drinking wine. I deprecate 
everything which shall tend to intemperance, and L believe that 
many men suffer from the use of wine and spirits, even in a mod- 
erate way. But I love to tell the truth, even when it is unfashion- 
able. I believe that very many persons are benefited by the juice 
of the grape, and I choose to say so. Moreover, I believe that 
persons disposed to intemperance are not to be restrained from in- 
dulging their vicious propensity, by the abstinence of their more 
prudent neighbors." * 

Professor Gairdner, of Edinburgh, while wholly 
opposing the theory of retarding the metamorpho- 
sis of tissue as a desirable end, and while admitting 
that to the perfect ideal man, living in the enjoyment 
of all natural and wholesome vital stimuli, amid per- 
fect hygienic conditions, such liquors are probably 
worse than superfluous, declares his desire to leave 
all the physiological abstractions, and to take his 
stand on the great broad series of recognized facts, 
which prove their relieving, reviving and supporting 
power under difficulties and in emergencies; claim- 
ing the right of reason to discriminate between their 
use and abuse. In that spirit he quotes in his work 
on " Clinical Medicine " this paragaaph, from the 

* Letters to a Young Physician just entering upon Practice, by Or 
James Jackson, M. D., LL.D , Professor Emeritus of the Theory aud Prac- 
tice of Physic in the University of Cambridge, late Physician Massachu- 
setts General Hospital, Honorary Member of the Medico-Chirurgical Soci- 
ety of London, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Medicine at 
Paris, &c, &c, &c. 



31 

" Letters to a Young Physician," calling it " the 
ivhole matter in a nutshell" 

ISTot content with my own unlearned reflections, 
or even to leave the matter with Dr. Anstie, I 
called the subject, as it is presented by Lallemand, 
to the attention of Dr. James C. White, the learned 
assistant-professor of chemistry in Harvard College. 
The report made by that gentleman, confirms the 
belief, in which Anstie had also concurred, that 
some alcohol is eliminated unchanged "through the 
channels indicated by Lallemand and his friends; 
thus establishing an error in the previously held 
theory that, with the exception of a small amount 
which escaped by the lungs during expiration, this 
substance was entirely consumed within the organ- 
ism. But he affirms that these experiments in no 
way prove that alcohol is eliminated in totality from 
the system; for the experiments on which that con- 
clusion is based, furnish the strongest possible evi- 
dence of its unwarrantableness. The very experi- 
ments on which alone they rest the conclusion that 
all which is taken into the animal economy escapes 
again unchanged, fail to discover any but a very 
small percentage discharged through the various 
channels of elimination. Yet the assertion is, that 
all has been thus eliminated; while if anything is 



32 

proved at all, it is proved that alcohol is nearly all 
consumed within the organism, and that a very 
small percentage escapes unchanged. But it should 
be remembered that an excessive quantity of either 
salt or sugar being taken into the system, the excess 
is disposed of in the same way. 

Of the proposition that " alcohol is never trans- 
formed, never destroyed " in the organism, Dr. White 
reports thus : — 

" Former investigators had come to the conclusion that alcohol 
was converted into aldehyde and acetic acid, progressive products 
of oxygenation of alcohol, which, in turn, underwent further trans- 
formation, and that it finally escaped as carbonic acid and water. 
Lallemand, &c, examined the blood, after the use of alcohol, and 
failed to find either aldehyde or acetic acid, and on this negative 
evidence alone is based the sweeping conclusion. Even if we admit 
the correctness and fairness of their results, which were obtained by 
experiments performed at too early a period to be completely sat- 
isfactory, and which are met by those of Bouchardet, they in no way 
invalidate the theory of the transformation of alcohol in the organ- 
ism. We know too little of the many and complex changes which 
organic substances undergo within the economy, to speak in such 
positive terms. Those conclusions may or may not be adopted as 
to the conversion of alcohol into aldehyde and acetic acid ; they 
certainly in no w <y settle the question as to its transformation or 
derf auction in the system.'* 

But, besides these proofs, you have in evidence 
before you the testimony of Dr. White in person, of 
Dr. Edward H. Clarke, Professor of Materia Medica, 
of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor of Anat- 
omy and Physiology, of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, Pro- 



33 

fessor of Surgery, of Dr. J. B. S. Jackson, Professor 
of Morbid Anatomy and Pathology, and of Dr. D. 
Humphreys Storer, Professor of Obstetrics, (all in 
the Medical School of Harvard College;) of Dr. 
Charles T. Jackson and Professor E. If. Horsford, 
both eminent in chemistry and other branches of nat- 
ural science. Those gentlemen constitute an array 
of experts in the sciences of chemistry, physiology 
and medicine, who are recognized as authority in the 
other hemisphere, as well as in our own. With their 
testimony before the Committee, forming a part of 
the printed record of its investigations, I need only 
allude to it without recital. I hold, that the opinions 
of these gentlemen, aided also by that of Professor 
Agassiz, who testified to the fact of the use of wine, 
with manifestly happy effects, in the actual alimen- 
tation of European peoples, have, for all the purposes 
.of legislative inquiry, established the dietetic uses of 
alcoholic beverages, when employed in moderation, and 
'properly combined in the construction of diet. Their 
opinions again are reinforced by the recent physio- 
logical experiments tried with ingenious variety in 
his own person, by Dr. Hammond, lately surgeon- 
general of the army of the United States, and the 
conclusions arrived at by that eminent physiologist.* 

* See Hammond's ''Physiological Memoirs," Philadelphia, 1863. 
3 



34 

It does not follow, that because an old man, or an 
ill- fed man, or an overtasked man, or an invalid, may 
find alcoholic beverages useful, they are not useless 
or hurtful to others. It does not follow, that because 
they are good for some at sometimes, they are good 
for all or at all times. Nor, on the other hand does 
it follow, because in their excess and misapplication, 
they are indescribably bad, that, u with bell, book 
and candle," they should be solemnly cursed by the 
General Court. 

This review of the assumjrtion that, because alcohol 
taken in excess is injurious, it is therefore always a 
poison, will soon be ended. The statement of the 
proposition would seem to exhibit its fallacy, for it 
is arguing from abuse to use, and it is denying that 
difference in quantity can produce difference in 
quality. 

The assertion is that, because alcohol taken into 
the system in certain quantities acts as a poison, it 
is therefore in all quantities and dilutions a poison. 
Let us examine it in the light of familiar illustra- 
tions. Omitting for the moment facts in evidence 
pertaining to alcohol itself, we have analogy perfect 
and to the point, in atmospheric air. 

Atmospheric air is composed of, by weight, 23.01 
of oxygen, and 76.99 of nitrogen. Each of the con- 



35 

stitueiits of the air is essential to the present order 
of things. Oxygen is pre-eminently its active 
element. Daly to restrain this activity the oxygen 
is diluted and weakened by three times its bulk of 
the negative element — nitrogen. Their properties 
are thus 'perfectly adjusted to the requirements of 
the living world. Were the atmosphere wholly 
composed of nitrogen, life could never have been 
possible; were it to consist wholly of oxygen, other 
conditions remaining as they are, the world would 
run through its career with fearful rapidity; com- 
bustion, once excited, would proceed with ungovern- 
able violence; animals would live with hundred-fold 
intensity, and perish in a few hours. 

To infer from the effects of a large quantity to 
those of a less, is thus contrary to sound observa- 
tion. Oxygen, pure, is a poison, — that is, we should 
die in it. Dilute it with three-fourths of nitrogen, 
and it becomes the air we breathe and by which all 
life is supported. 

Saltpetre kills a man in doses of one ounce or 
upward. Eight ounces dissolved in a pint of water 
killed a horse. Two or three drachms only, will 
kill a dog. Nay, this very nitre or saltpetre may 
easily be a remediless poison. 

44 In acute rheumatism it is sometimes administered in closes 



36 

repeated at intervals to the extent of two ounces in twenty-four 
hours ; though one-half ounce in concentrated solution causes heat 
and pain in the stomach which may be followed with convulsions 
and death. When taken in poisonous quantities there is no anti- 
dote kjioivn." * 

Yet, saltpetre is used without fear of evil conse- 
quences in the curing of haras and other meats. 
Shall we say that a sandwich is poisonous and should 
be prohibited by law? 

With one more quotation from the able pen of Mr. 
Lewes, I dismiss this fallacy from further argu- 
ment: — 

" When people say ' Oh, this is only a question of degree,' they 
forget how frequently questions of degree involve questions of kind. 
Ice and steam differ only in the degree of heat ; the cold of the 
Arctics and the heat of the Tropics are but differences of degree. 

" Iron in a mass exposed to the air, burns, but burns so slowly 
that we call it rust; the same iron in a state of extreme subdivi- 
sion ignites when expossed to the air. Here we have only differ- 
ences of degree, yet if an inflammable substance be near the ig- 
nited powder, it will also ignite, whereas the same substance might 
remain forever close by the rusting iron and never be affected. If 
this be true in cases so simple, how much more should we expect 
to find it in cases so complex as those of organic processes where 
minute variations ramify into vast and unforeseen results ! 

" The argument from excess is worthless. It only meets cases 
of excess. Oxygen is as terrible a poison as strychnine, if in ex- 
cess. Heat, so indispensable to the organism, is obliged to be re- 
duced to moderate quantities before the organism can endure it. 
Light, w T hich is the necessary stimulus to the eye, produces blind- 
ness, in excess ; mutton-chops have, when taken in moderation, a 
nutritive value which no Briton is bold enough to question, * * * 

* New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. xii., p. 377. Art. Nitre. 



37 

yet mutton-chops taken in excess kill with the certainty of arsenic, 
for over-nutrition is fatal." 

And now, in concluding my remarks upon what I 
have termed the scientific view of the question, I 
repeat, in the words of Mr. Lewes : — 

"Let no advocate of temperance misconstrue the 
present [argument.] We rescue a scientific ques- 
tion, we do not oppose the moral principles of the 
movement. That drunkenness is one of the most 
terrible sources of demoralization, and that temper- 
ance, both physically and morally, is one of the car- 
dinal virtues most needing inculcation, no reasonable 
being doubts. Equally indisputable is it that any 
movement which can effect a reform in the tendency 
to drunkenness, deserves the heartiest support. 'Nov 
are we surprised at the exaggerations and errors 
which such a movement employs as instruments to 
effect its purpose. * * * Our purpose, then, be it 
understood, is not to cast a stone of obstruction in 
the path of the temperance movement, but to argue 
a scientific question." 

This much, at all events, is clear, viz. : That the 
Legislature of Massachusetts has no knowledge, and 
has no means of knowing, that the classification, {so 
commonly and so authoritatively made,) by which al- 
cohol, as found in certain drinks, is included in the 



38 

category of foods, is not correct. If that classifica- 
tion is correct, then there is an end of the contro- 
versy. For then it cannot be held that the govern- 

* 

ment ought to prohibit the citizen from making up 
his own bill of fare for himself; though he can be 
held accountable for his evil conduct affecting others, 
proceeding from his abusing this liberty. 

But those who insist on the existing statute of pro- 
hibition, in spite of the fact that those drinks are 
foods, or that they may be such, and that most mas- 
ters of chemistry and physiology have so taught, and 
that the successive generations of men have so 
believed, and that the most venerable exemplars of 
all human history have confirmed that belief by their 
own examples, and that a great portion of the people 
of Massachusetts think so now, and at least demand 
the right of deciding the question for themselves, — 
those who thus insist, dare to propose to drive rough- 
shod over all respect for the convictions of their 
neighbors, and, assuming a theory entirely modern, 
(and at the best, uncertain and controverted,) to 
continue and to enforce the pains and the disgraces 
of the criminal law in its support. If the 'proposition, 
on which alone prohibition by the government can 
possibly stand, is true, let it be proved. I, certainly, 
for one, having meditated upon it, and observed upon 



39 

it for years, have not seen it established. I am entirely 
willing to find it true. And if it is true, I desire that 
its truth shall be made clear. But I want it estab- 
lished by methods fit to be pursued by free and rational 
men. I desire that every obstacle may be removed 
from the path of inquiry, and that the minds of all 
the people may be disabused of every just ground of 
prejudice, and be made hospitable and receptive. I 
know that wilfulness and violence, even under the 
forms of law, can only arouse contradiction and 
resentment. I know that, besides these, there will 
continue to be aroused an honest sense of personal 
injustice inflicted by the operation of statues believed 
to be founded on incorrect notions, arbitrarily insisted 
upon, and obstinately adhered to. While such rela- 
tions last, there is no opportunity for men on either 
►side to reach the best conclusions. The mere war of 
words is of itself always sufficiently disturbing. But, 
it seems an almost wanton disregard of the laws and 
the rights of the human mind, to complicate and dis- 
tract, as the upholders of this law have done, the 
moral and intellectual issues which the whole subject 
involves. Grant that you have much reason to 
believe the proposition of the Prohibitionists true, I 
submit that no honest man can yet declare that it is 
proved. Nay — outside of the lists of controversy 



40 

— where are the intelligent judges who are prepared 
to affirm that it enjoys even the prejjonderance of the 
proofs ? 

I honor these scholars, whose testimony has been 
cited, for their ingenious pursuit of science. I should 
never fear that such men would draw extreme con- 
clusions, nor insist on their premature adoption by 
others; for learning is modest. 

That alcohol can be easily fatal ; that it is hurtful 
always, — unless taken both in moderation, and under 
circumstances, and in compounds, and in combina- 
tions, adapted to the physical condition and the true 
needs of the individual, — there is no possible dispute. 
But that all the drinks into which it enters, are to be 
of course dietetically rejected, is not, thus far, the 
verdict. Nov does it yet appear that any experiments 
have settled the boundaries within which diet shall 
be kept. A physician once starved to death a duck, 
by feeding it solely on butter. It lived three weeks, 
and until the butter oozed through its skin and 
dropped from its feathers.* Yet butter is not a 
poison. We know very well that a man could not 
maintain health, nor even life, long, on water to 
drink and sugar to eat. Yet neither is a poisoji. Dr. 

*Boussingault, — Chimie Agricole, p. 166; quoted in Treatise on Phys- 
iology, by John C. Dalton, p. 108. 



41 

Stark actually died in the experiment of trying to 
live on cheese. Yet everybody knows that cheese is 
a rich and nutritious food. The instances might be 
indefinitely multiplied of proofs in our common ob- 
servation, of the inability of single articles of acknowl- 
edged wholesome and nutritious solid food to main- 
tain life and health, used singly and without variety. 
For example, how long would a man live in Havana, 
on pork only? How long would a healthy Green- 
lander subsist, amid his snows, on oranges? Or, how 
long could we, in Boston even, live on either? The 
common experience of men certainly goes for some- 
thing. Now the common experience of many nations 
and ages having assigned a place in the foods and 
medicines, to stimulating drinks of some kinds, into 
which alcohol enters — the experiments of chemists 
and physiologists are pursued, when made in the 
interest of truth and pure science, with a view to 
detecting, identifying and comparing their modes of 
operation, and correcting the errors of inadvertence 
in common life. And when the men of science have 
come to any substantial agreement, which calls on 
the civil state to interpose and alter the practice of 
society, in order to conform it to the decrees of sci- 
ence, we shall learn it from the men of science them- 
selves; we shall not be called on by the unlearned to 



42 

settle such disputes of the learned by an Act of the 
Legislature. 

Within my own memory Dr. Sylvester Graham 
taught that no permanent cure for intemperance 
could be found, except in such changes of personal 
and social customs as would relieve the human being 
of all desire for stimulants. He soon applied the 
idea to medicine, so that the prevention and cure of 
disease, as well as the remedy for intemperance, were 
found by him in the resort of all mankind, without 
regard to age, climate or condition, to the use of 
water as the only beverage, and the eating of vege- 
tables to the entire exclusion of animal food. And I 
confess that he seemed to prove it. His theories 
were ingenious, fortified by elaborate argument. 
They would have been very good, save that almost 
all the rest of mankind saw that they were not true. 
Even some of the very experiments on which he 
relied, contradict his too rash and dogmatical gen- 
eralization. 



A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. 



Had Graham convinced many, as for a time he did 
convince a few, then we might to-day have been 
arguing as a question of legislative prohibition, the 



43 

case of Rhine wines and porter in company with 
that of mutton chops and beef steaks, all being 
included in the like condemnation. 

II. 

Leaving here, gentlemen, the argument on the 
assumption by the Prohibitionists that alcoholic bev- 
erages are essentially poisonous, I pass to the argu- 
ment on their further assumption, that the use and 
the sale of alcoholic beverages are essentially im- 
moral. 

The evils of this world are too great to render 
exaggeration any more consistent with wisdom than 
with truth. What we need is courage, not cow- 
ardice, for the controversy against them. This 
world is a trying one to live in at all. But when 
its discipline is complete we shall go hence. After 
all, the moral dangers are within ourselves, not in 
the objects of nature. And social evils find their 
causes mainly in the falseness and disorder of the 
social economy. The savage ignorantly ascribes 
malign purposes and supernatural powers to things 
sometimes the most inanimate and senseless. He 
sees them in some near relation, real or fancied, to 
woes already endured or evils apprehended. He 
seeks to conciliate them by worship. And that we 



44 

justly call superstition. But civilized man is not 
wholly unlike him. Sometimes, perceiving that in 
human society, in affairs, even in the uses of natural 
things, and in the operation of the passions native 
to the very constitution of the race, there are mani- 
fold abuses, he flees, disheartened and disgusted, 
from human society, abjures affairs, despises nature 
and all her loveliness, and contradicts and quarrels 
with all the intimations of nature within himself. 

It is only in the strife and actual controversy of 
life — natural, human and free — that robust virtue 
can be attained, or positive good accomplished. It 
is only in similar freedom alike from bondage and 
pupilage, alike from the prohibitions of artificial leg- 
islation on the one hand, and superstitious fears on 
the other, that nations or peoples can become thrifty, 
happy and great. Will you venture to adhere to the 
effete blunders of antiquated despotisms, in the hope 
of serving, by legal force, the moral welfare of your 
posterity? Will you insist on the dogma that, even 
if certain gifts of nature or science are not poisons, 
they are nevertheless so dangerously seductive that 
no virtue can be trusted to resist them? But when 
society shall have intrusted the keeping o,f its virtue 
to the criminal laws, who will guaranty your success 
in the experiment, tried by so many nations and 



45 

ages, resulting always in failure and defeat? Do 
you exclaim, that the permitted sale of these bever- 
ages, followed as it must be by some use, must be 
followed, in turn, by some drunkenness; and that 
drunkenness is not only the parent cause of nearly 
all our social woes, but that it is impossible to 
maintain against its ravages a successful moral 
war? To both these propositions, moral philosophy, 
human experience, and history, all command a 
respectful dissent. 

Reason, experience and history all unite to prove 
that, while drunkenness lies in near relations with 
poverty and other miseries, and is very often their 
proximate cause, it is not true that it is the parent, 
or essential cause, without which they would not 
have been. And to the teachings of reason, experi- 
ence and history, are added the promises of Gospel 
Grace, enabling me in all boldness, to confront the 
fears of those who would rest the hopes of humanity 
on the commandments of men. 

The evils of society, in our own country and in the 
northern nations, have always tended to appear on 
the surface in the form of this sensual indulgence. 
And yet, the essential evil has always been less deeply 
seated, while at the same time, the hope of social 
regeneration is brighter, within them, than among 



46 

some other peoples, in whom the instinctive love of 
liberty is weaker, and among whom such indulgence 
is comparatively unknown. 

Writing in 1799, Croker says in his '• Travels in 
Spain": — 

" The habitual temperance of these people is really astonishing ; 
/ never saw a Spaniard drink a second gktbs of wine. With the 
lower order of people, a piece of bread with an apple, an onion, or 
a pomegranate, is their usual repast." 

And many writers and travellers at different periods 
concur in describing them as temperate, frugal, and 
even abstemious as a rule, testifying that f? drunken- 
ness is a vice almost unknown in Spain among peo- 
ple of a respectable class, and even very uncommon 
among the lower orders." 

An English clergyman, eight years ago, in 1859, 
describing a tour through Spain, remarks, that when 
they were approaching the plains of Castile: — 

<w It had now become quite evident, from the number of beggars, 
male and female, adult and juvenile, with their tattered brown 
clothing and mahogany complexion, that we were at length in ver- 
itable Spain." * 

Again he says : f — 

" In all our wanderings through town and country, along the 
highways and by-ways of the land, from Bayonne to Gibraltar, we 
never saw more than four men who were in the least intoxicated. 

* Eoberts's Autumn Tour hi Spain, p. 61. f pp. 320, 321. 



47 



If they would only leave off those two national sins, bad language 
and misuse of the knife, they would be some of the finest peasantry 
in the world." 

Our own distinguished fellow-citizen, William 
Cullen Bryant, in a series of letters written in 1857, 

says : — 

44 The only narcotic in which the Spaniards indulge to any extent 
is tobacco, in favor of which I have nothing to say ; yet it should 
be remembered in extenuation, that they are tempted to this habit 
by the want of something else to do ; that they husband their cig- 
arritos by smoking with great deliberation, making a little tobacco 
go a great way, and that they dilute its narcotic fumes with those 
of the paper in which it is folded. With regard to the use of wine, 
I can confirm all that has been said of Sjianish sobriety and moder- 
ation." 

But Spain, though once prosperous and rich, 
became in spite of the temperance and abstinence 
of her people, miserably and frightfully poor. Her 
manufactures, once the meansj of employment of 
hundreds of thousands of workmen, passed into 
decay and neglect. Her agriculture at the begin- 
ning of the present century failed to supply wheat 
enough for the consumption of her people. And 
notwithstanding many institutions of hospitality and 
charity, maintained by the ecclesiastical orders, and 
by contributions, from the public funds, the poor are 
so numerons, that beggary in some of the provinces 
is considered no disgrace, and even students have 



48 

been known to occupy their vacations in excursions 
to raise by begging, the means required for their 
personal support, labor being regarded by them as 
more disreputable than asking alms. Supremely 
ignorant, notwithstanding the acknowledged grav- 
ity, sobriety, sincerity and generosity of the Spanish 
character, the people are miserably poor in the midst 
of fertility of almost tropical exuberance. And 
their country, — possessing within herself nearly 
every mineral and vegetable production needful or 
convenient to mankind, holding numerous ports, and 
a geographical position commanding greater com- 
mercial advantages than any other country in 
Europe, but without the idea of liberty, — sleeps, a 
torpid mass, a giant prostrate and powerless, bound 
by the principles and traditions of five hundred years 
ago. Notwithstanding the abstinence of her people 
from the indulgence of the bowl, neither her future 
nor her present would offer any temptations to the 
people of New England. 

Do not let us deceive ourselves into reversing the 
order of our own history. If drunkenness is the 
essential parent cause, and not usually the mere con- 
comitant or consequence, of social degredation, there 
ought to be a time found somewhere far back in the 
former ages, when our own ancesters were sober, vir- 



49 

tuous and happy; but when, visited by the seductive 
fruit of the vine, and falling into the snare of un- 
wonted and alluring temptation, the shadow of a 
great woe came over them, never to pass away until 
the wine shall cease to redden in the cup. But the 
truth is otherwise. There has never been any such 
day of innocence and happiness, since Adam was 
banished from Eden. And yet, it is not difficult to 
trace back the steps of the progress of that country 
from which most Americans sprung, to times long 
before the introduction of spirits, or wines, or beer, 
or even ale itself into England. 

The Britons, prior to the Roman conquest, knew 
so little of agriculture, were so rude and barbarous, 
that the strongest liquor they had, w r as mead, or, 
honey mixed with water and allowed to ferment, — 
a product of the rudest and simplest kind, and of 
which the quantity possible must have been of neces- 
sity very little. But nevertheless, those were days 
of the spiritual domination of the Druids, of the dark- 
est superstition, and of the brutal sacrifice of inno- 
cent human victims. 

Under the Anglo-Saxons, parents are known to 
have exposed their children in the market place 
for sale like cattle. The poverty of the poor and 
the helplessness of their lot were such that on 

4 



50 

occasions of famine, to which in former times, 
England, rich, fertile and merry, but ignorant and 
unthrifty, was no stranger, many of them who were 
free, having no means of living, sold themselves 
into slavery. During all the feudal ages, private 
wars raged constantly. The feudal lords lived in a 
state of war against each other, and of rapine 
towards all mankind. A great portion of the peo- 
ple were helpless bondmen. All Europe was a 
scene of internal anarchy during the middle ages, 
and though England was less exposed to the scourge 
of private war than most nations on the conti- 
nent, she endured tumultuous rapine and frightful 
social disorder. The whole population of Eng- 
land, covering a territory seven or eight times as 
large as Massachusetts, was not, five hundred years 
ago, a million greater in number than the present 
inhabitants of our own Commonwealth. When 
Latin ceased to be a living language, the newly 
formed, or modern tongues, not being used in pub- 
lic documents or correspondence, the very use of 
books or letters was almost wholly unknown to 
the people. Schools, confined to cathedrals and 
monasteries, and exclusively designed fqr ecclesias- 
tical purposes, afforded no encouragement or 
opportunity to the laity. It was rare for one of 



51 

them, of whatever rank, to be able to write his 
name. Even the minor clergy were sometimes 
unable to translate into their own language the 
words they chanted in the celebration of the mass. 
The barons tyrannized over both serfs and tenants, 
and from the oppression of their absolute will the 
humble and despised could expect little redress and 
no permanent relief. The rudeness of agriculture, 
the absence of enterprising, intelligent commerce, 
the utter poverty of science, the discouragement of 
all the arts by the nobles who scorned everything 
but arms, kept down the poor, and rendered the 
masses both hopeless and contemptible. War, 
slavery and ignorance could not fail to exhibit as 
their natural concomitant, the coarse, sensual indul- 
gence of appetite, both excessive and depraved. 
Revelry and wassail distinguished the festivities 
and rejoicings of victory and the celebration of 
public events, invaded the solemnities of the 
church, and divided with indolence and the chase 
the empire of private life, whenever arms were 
silent. And what better fate or fortune could have 
been expected for the common poor, the serf, the 
follower, the retainer, than the humble and remote 
imitation of his lord? 

The people were saved from the sense of insuppor- 



52 

table misery, of conscious degradation, and of infinite- 
hopelessness, by the brutishness of manners and their 
capacity for low enjoyments. Humanity, like Psyche 
in Grecian fable, enduring servitude and trial, wan- 
dering about in search of her lost but immortal love, 
is invisibly eomforted and sustained. She wears 
always the wings which will one day unfold them- 
selves for flight, when, purified both by passion and 
misfortune, she is ready for happiness in re-union 
with the lover whose immortality bhe has come to 
share. Wandering, like the maiden from temple to 
temple, scorned, buffeted and oppressed, humanity 
retreats behind mortality, which shelters while it be- 
clouds the soul. A tender and divine spirit is forever 
watching over her, softening calamity, whispering 
hope, providing deliverance, and assisting her con- 
quest. By a universal law of nature, matter gravi- 
tates. But, by a universal spiritual law, the soul 
asjrires. There is limit to moral disease. There 
is always a balm, and a physician in Gilead. The 
cure is often slow; but the patient lives forever. 

Descending to a later era, I need only to borrow 
Macaulay's vivid picture of the character of England 
during the century between the Tudors and the 
Guelphs : 

" There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of 



53 



.the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that 
our ancestors were less humane, than their posterity. The disci- 
pline of workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more 
efficient than at present, were infinitely harsher. Masters, well 
born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Peda- 
gogues knew no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their 
pupils. Husbands, of decent station, were not ashamed to beat 
their wives. The implacability of hostile factions was such as we 
can scarcely conceive. Whigs were disposed to murmur because 
Stafford was suffered to die without seeing his bowels burned be- 
fore his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell as his coach 
passed from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. As 
little mercy was shown by the populace to sufferers of a humbler 
rank. If an offender was put into the pillory, it was well if he es- 
caped with life from the show of brick-bats and paving-stones. 
If he was tied to the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him, im- 
ploring the hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl. 
Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court days, 
for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp 
there whipped. A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a 
woman burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt 
for a galled horse or an over-driven ox. Fights, compared with 
which a boxing-match is a refined and humane spectacle, were 
among the favorite diversions of a large part of the town. Multi- 
tudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with 
deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the com- 
batants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells on earth, 
seminaries of every crime, and of every disease. At the assizes, 
the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to 
the dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes 
avenged them signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this 
misery society looked with profound indifference. Nowhere could 
be found that sensitive and restless compassion which has, in our 
time, extended a powerful protection to the factory child, to the 
Hindoo widow, to the negro slave, which peers into the stpres and 
water- casks of every emigrant ship, which winces at every lash 
laid on the back of a drunken soldier, which will not suffer the thief 



54 

in the hulks to be ill-fed or over-worked, and which has repeatedly ] 
endeavored to save the life even of the murderer." * 

A hundred years ago, in the habits of the best 
Englishmen, there existed the traces and conse- 
quences of the old demoralization. England was 
free. The long agony with the Stuarts was over. 
A new era had begun, of fame, of prosperity, of cul- 
ture, of opportunity for the people, of literature, of 
ideas. But the social disease was not cured. The 
best were, still afflicted by it. Drunkenness still 
remained, as one of its symptoms and expressions, 
on the upper surface and in the purest society. 
Bigotry, both religious and political, was a repulsive 
and characteristic feature of the country gentleman. 
He hated his neighbor, of different opinions, because 
they differed. The machinery of both Whig and 
Tory was unlimited bribery. The "Folly" coffee- 
house was his resort in town, where rural ladies 
listened to words of compliment from the wits and 
beaux of the time, which those of our own time 
would not dare to read. The duchess and the 
courtesan were alike visitors, where the gay maskers 
indulged in the allusions and jests of a corrupt taste 
and a licensed opportunity. " At the beginning of 

* Macaulay's History of England, Vol. i., pp. 394, 395, (Harper's octavo 
edition.) 



55 

the eighteenth century," (says a recent historian), 
and long after, we see no struggle against great 
social evils, on the part of the clergy or the laity. 
Every attempt at social reform was left to the legis- 
lature, which was utterly indifferent to those mani- 
festations of wickedness and crime, that ought to 
have been dealt with by the strong hand. Educa- 
tion, in any large sense, there was none. Disease 
pursued its ravages, unchecked by any attempt to 
mitigate the evils of standing pools before the 
cottage door, and pestilent ditches in the towns. 
* * * There were evils so abhorrent to humanity, 
that their endurance, without the slightest endeavor 
to mitigate or remove them, was an opprobrium of 
that age. The horrible state of the prisons was well 
known. The nosegay laid on the desk of the judge 
at every assize proclaimed that starvation and filth 
were sweeping away far more than perished by the 
executioner, terrible as that number was. * * * 
London, and all other great towns, were swarming 
with destitute children, who slept in ash-holes,' and 
at street doors. They were left to starve, and in 
due course to become thieves, and be hanged. * * 
One-fifth of the whole population were paupers" * 
Disease, filth, ignorance, licentious manners, neg- 

* Popular History of Engand, by Charles Knight, Vol. v., page 60. 



lect of human want or woe, judicial cruelty, and 
pauperism! It needs only drunkenness to complete 
the picture. It was not the cause of all this. But it 
ivas a necessary concomitant; a part of the natural 
expression of an almost infinite inward evil. And I 
sometimes wonder whether, in permitting so many 
to yield to this merely sensual indulgence of brutish 
men, Divine Providence had not saved them from 
becoming human devils.' That feature was not 
wanting, in the age to which I allude. I will allow 
the same historian to finish the description. 

Quoting from the "Guardian," he goes on to 
say: 

" * A method of spending one's time agreeably is a 
thing so little studied, that the common amusement 
of our young gentlemen, especially of such as are at 
a distance from those of the first breeding, is drink- 
ing.' Yet we have abundant evidence that those ? of 
the first breeding ' were often the most intemperate. 
The moralists were not exempt from the common 
vice of our young gentlemen. Swift says: ? I dined 
with Mr. Addison and Dick Stuart, Lord Mountjoy's 
brother, a treat of Addison's. They were half 
fuddled, but not I, for I mixed water wjth my 
wine.' " 

Gaming was the universal passion of the reign of 



57 

Anne. In the first number of the " Tatler," it is 
said of "Will's Coffee House : ?? This place is very 
much altered since Mr. Dryden frequented it. 
Where you used to see songs, epigrams and satires, 
in the hands of every one you met, you have now 
only a pack of cards. Into these places of public 
resort the lowest sharpers found their way; and 
gentlemen were not ashamed to stake their money 
against the money of the most infamous of soci- 
ety." 

In Italy, writes Steele, " a cobbler may be heard 
working to an opera tune; and there is not a laborer 
or handicraftman that, in the cool of the evening, 
does not relieve himself with solos and sonnets." But, 
"on the contrary, our honest countrymen have so 
little inclination to music, that they seldom begin to 
sing until they are drunk? Sir John Hawkins has 
described the musical entertainments which were 
offered to the middle classes at this period. He 
says that " the landlords of public houses hired per- 
formers, and hither came very unrefined audiences, 
to drink and to smoke." 

Writing of English life and manners, at about the 
end of the last century, or just after the American 
Revolution, Miss Martineau thus exhibits the same 
connection of sensual vulgarity on the surface, with 



58 

deep and pervading contempt of the sacredness of 
humanity at the core : * — 

61 While the course of daily living was hard to the working man, 
and his future precarious, the Law was very cruel. The records of 
the Assizes in the Chronicle of Events are sickening to read. The 
vast and absurd variety of offences for which men and women were 
sentenced to death by the score, out of which one-third or so were 
really hanged, gives now an impression of devilish levity in dealing 
with human life ; and must, at the time, have precluded all rational 
conception on the part of the many, as to what Law is, to say nothing 
of that attachment to it, and reverence and trust in regard to it, 
which are indispensable to the true citizen temper." 

" The general health was at a lower average among all these dis- 
tresses than was even safe for a people who might at any moment 
have to struggle for their existence. The habit of intemperance in 
wine was still prevalent among gentlemen, so that we read of one pub- 
lic man after another whose death or incapacity was ascribable to 
disease from drinking. Members of the cabinet, members of par- 
liament and others, are quietly reported to have said this and that 
when they were drunk. The spirit decanters were brought out in 
the evenings in middle-class houses, as a matter of course ; and 
gout and other liver and stomach disorders were prevalent to a de- 
gree which the children of our time have no conception of. During 
the scarcity, the diseases of scarcity abounded, of course." 

But allow me in a moment to relieve the picture. 
You all know how mighty and universal has been 
the movement of the nineteenth century. The axe 
has been laid at the root of the tree. There has been 
a patient, hopeful, scientific and learned, as well as a 
pious, philanthropy. The disease was a radical 

* History of England, from 1816 to 1854, with an Introduction, 1800 to 
18L5. Vol. i., p. 28, 29. 



59 

disease. The cure is a radical reform. The 
recognition of the people, of their wants and 
woes, their essential capacity, their rights, their pro- 
gressive tendency, their citizenship, their humanity, 
the oneness of man with his brother man, the benig- 
nant fatherhood of Almighty God, — this recogni- 
tion, which exposes the littleness of worldly distinc- 
tion in the presence of the unity of the brotherhood, 
has waked up the intelligence, the heart and soul of 
England, to the work of studious and persistent 
reform, as radical as the malady of which Love i s 
the healer and Justice the medicine. 

Dating back from the middle to the beginning of 
this nineteenth century, what had been accomplished 
in this work? The vice of drunkenness had grad- 
ually disappeared, with the coarseness, of which it 
was the natural expression, giving way to those 
humanizing and refining influences, with which sen- 
sual and brutal manners are inconsistent. 

" One of the most distinguished of Frenchmen 
comes as ambassador to England in 1840, and re- 
garding with a philosophical intelligence both the 
great and the humble, he thus contrasts the past 
with the present. Looking back to the end of the 
eighteenth century, he says that there were at that 
time, even in the elevated classes of English society, 



60 

many remains of gross and disorderly manners. 
Precisely because England had been for centuries a 
country of liberty, the most opposite results of that 
liberty had been developed in startling contrasts. 
A puritan severity was maintained side by side with 
the corruptions of the courts of Charles II. and the 
first Greorges; habits almost barbarous kept their 
hold in the midst of the progress of civilization; 
the splendor of power and of riches had not ban- 
ished from the higher social regions the excesses of 
a vulgar intemperance. Even the elevation of 
ideas and the supremacy of talent did not always 
carry with them delicacy of taste; for the Sheri- 
dan who had been electrifying parliament by his 
eloquence might the same night have been picked 
up drunk in the streets." 

" M. Guizot goes on to say, _' It is in our time 
that these shocking incongruities in the state of 
manners in England have vanished, and that Eng- 
lish society has become as polished as it is free; 
where gross habits are constrained to be hidden or 
to be reformed, and where civilization is day by 
day showing itself more general and more harmo- 
nious.' Two conditions of progress, he continues, 
which rarely go together, have been developed 
and attained during half a century in England. 



61 

The laws of morality have been strengthened, and 
manners have at the same time become softer, less 
inclined to violent excesses, more elegant." * 

This eminent French writer and statesman says 
also that the double progress of a stricter morality, 
and a refinement of manners was not confined to the 
higher and middle classes, but was very apparent 
amongst the bulk of the people. " The domestic life, 
laborious and regular, extends its empire over these 
classes. They comprehend, they seek, they enjoy, 
more honest and more delicate pleasures than orutal 
quarrels or drunkenness. The amelioration is cer- 
tainly very incomplete. Gross passions and disor- 
derly habits are always fermenting in the bosom of 
obscure and idle misery; and in London, Manches- 
ter, or Glasgow, there are ample materials for the 
most hideous descriptions. But, take it all in all, 
civilization and liberty have in England, during the 
course of the nineteenth century, turned to the profit 
of good rather than of evil. Religious faith, Chris- 
tian charity, philanthropic benevolence, the intelli- 
gent and indefatigable activity of the higher classes, 
and good sense spread amongst all classes, have 
battled, and now battle effectually against the vices 

* Popular History of England, by Charles Knight, Vol. viii., pp. 401, 402. 



62 

of society, and the evil inclinations of human na- 
ture." * 

This progress was not mechanical. It was dy- 
namic. It was not Jewish, nor Mohammedan; but 
it was Christian. It was not due to law, but to lib- 
erty. It came not from the thunders of burning 
Sinai, but from the silent inward voice. 

A writer in the " Democratic Review," in 1848, 
discussing the topic of " Poverty and Misery " in 
their relation to " Reform and Progress," mainly in 
the direction of politics, laments the apparent defeat 
of the people in the successive popular struggles of 
the old world. He records the continued existence of 
the old poverty and misery, with modifications only, 
notwithstanding the promise which heralded the rev- 
olutions of that period. He turns from cause to 
cause, from the nostrum of one political doctor to the 
palmistry of another, and slides at last into an ex- 
clamation of despair at the experience of the old 
world, and the prospect at home, in view of the un- 
known cause of what he discovered at last was '• a 
general and obstinate disease" " From statistics 
lately published," he remarks, when alluding to 
France, " it appears that one-eighth of her population 

* Guizot — " Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon temps," Tome v., 
1862. 



G3 

are habitually clothed in rags; that nearly three- 
fifths never eat wheaten bread; that very nearly two- 
thirds wear wooden clogs instead of shoes; * * * 
and more than ten-elevenths of the whole population 
cannot afford to consume sugar and animal food.' 
How much of this continued depression and poverty 
was to be ascribed to drinking the wines of France 
may be seen in the fact that a more efficient prohibi- 
tion was found in the very poverty of the masses 
than ever slumbered in the arm of legislative power. 
For " more than three- fourths " of the whole popula- 
tion were shown by the same statistics, and declared 
by the same writer, in the same sentence, to be so 
poor that " they cannot get ivine to drink" notwith- 
standing that is and was a staple of the country. 
The truth, I think, may be discovered by looking 
Straight down to the bottom of the well. The 
French people inherited the consequences logically 
flowing from earlier barbarism, from Roman con- 
quests, from tribal, local, private and national wars, 
from the feudal servitudes, partly seen in a debt 
mortgaging the lands of the people, and weighing 
them down by an annual interest exceeding that of 
the public debt of Great Britain, leaving the pro- 
prietors and cultivators not more than twenty-four 
per cent, of the whole annual production, for the 



64 

maintenance of their families, while the low estate 
of agriculture (which means again the absence of 
science and machinery,) gave an average yield of 
only fourteen bushels of wheat, or twenty bushels of 
potatoes, to an acre of ground. 

Thirty years ago, at the accession of Victoria, the 
public mind had been already somewhat aroused by 
the report of a distinguished architect, concerning a 
district in London in which dwelt squalid misery, in 
perishing houses, und rained, un ventilated, in pestilen- 
tial alleys, where the typhus and every form of epi- 
demic and contagion always rioted. Soon after, 
inquiries promoted by parliament were extended 
through formal commissions into other large cities of 
England and Wales, and into Scotland. Mr. Chad- 
wick's report * exhibits the frightful result of a death- 
rate among these poor unfortunates of the lowest 
classes, doubling the mortality of their opulent neigh- 
bors. This mortality was largely owing to habits of 
filth and intemperance; but those habits ivere induced 
by the unavoidable degradation of physical causes 
which no virtue could override, "In closed courts 
where the sunshine never penetrated; where a breath 
of fresh air never circulated; where noxious vapors 
filled every corner from the horrible cesspools; where 

* Report of the Poor Law Commission. 



65 

the density of population was so excessive, as in 
itself to be sufficient to produce disease; where a 
single room was often occupied by a whole family, 
without regard to age or sex, — the wonder is how 
the poor lived at all, uncared for by the rich who 
knew them not, neglected by their employers, who 
in some trades exposed them to labor in workshops 
not far superior in ventilation to the Black Hole of 
Calcutta. Amongst these careless and avaricious 
employers, the master tailors were the most notorious, 
who would huddle sixty or eighty workmen close to- 
gether, nearly knee to knee, in a room fifty feet long 
by twenty feet broad, lighted from above, where the 
temperature in summer was thirty degrees higher 
than the temperature outside. Young men from the 
country fainted when they were first confined in such 
a life-destroying prison : the maturer ones sustained 
themselves by gin, till they perished of consumption, 
or typhus, or delirium tremens." * One of the most 
eminent of living physiologists says, " Mr. Chad wick 
has shown that many are driven to drinking gin as 
affording a temporary relief to the feelings of depres- 
sion and exhaustion produced by living in a noxious 
atmosphere." f 

* Popular History of Englaud, by Charles Knight, Vol. viii., p. 392. 
f Psychological Inquiries, by Sir Benjamin C. Brodie, p. 78. 

5 



60 

Sir James Tennent, seven years ago, addressing 
the institution for promoting Social Science, speaks 
of the condition of the Irish laborers in England, of 
whom much complaint had been made for their habits 
of tippling and pauperism. So late as 1860, he de- 
scribes them as in the possession of " unwholesome 
dwellings in the most unhealthy portions " of the 
great cities, in whose " comfortless apartments do- 
mestic enjoyment is little known, and the inmates are 
inured from infancy to miasma, damp and decay." 
"Their food," he says, was "in quality, of the poorest 
by which existence can be maintained," and they en- 
joyed " the single excitement of intoxication" 

The testimony of the patient and philosophical 
Liebig is given, with the emphasis of positive opin- 
ion. " In many places destitution and misery have 
been ascribed to the increasing use of spirits. This 
is an error. The use of spirits is not the cause, hut 
an effect, of poverty. It is an exception from the 
rule when a well-fed man becomes a spirit drinker. 
On the other hand, when the laborer earns by his 
work less than is required to provide the amount of 
food which is indispensable in order to restore fully 
his working powers, an unyielding, inexorable law or 
necessity compels him to have recourse to spirits. He 
must work; but in consequence of insufficient food, 



67 

a certain portion of his working power is daily want- 
ing. Spirits, by their action on the nerves, enable 
him to make up the deficient power at the expense 
of his body; to consume to-day that quantity which 
ought naturally to have been employed a day later. 
He draws, so to speak, a bill on his health, which 
must always be renewed, because, for want of means 
he cannot take up; he consumes his capital instead 
of his interest; and the result is the inevitable bank- 
ruptcy of his body.' 1 * 

Bad as the condition is of the laboring classes in 
England, Mr. McCulloch, the political economist, 
writing in 1854, affirms that the condition of most 
classes of work-people had improved since the close 
of the American w T ar; that they were better fed, bet- 
ter clothed and better lodged, than at any former 
period. " Drunkenness and immorality," he adds, 
"if they have not materially abated, have not in- 
creased; while the manners of all classes have been 
humanized and softened." He affirms also, that 
" great improvement had taken place in the health 
and in the longevity of the population." Admitting 
that " the condition of the laboring class is far from 
prosperous," and that " the middle classes have 
always evinced far more prudence and forethought 

* Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 455. 



68 

than those below them," he testifies that the work- 
people of the present day are less vicious and im- 
provident, and more industrious, than their prede- 
cessors of any former age. But, why have not the 
humblest laboring class, while accomplishing their 
own measure of progress, equalled their superiors of 
the middle class in the ratio of advancement? It 
is simply because — as a wise writer says — " wretch- 
edness is incompatible with excellence: you can 
never make a wise and virtuous people out of a 
starving one." 

£Tor can more be demanded of a body of men, on 
whom has accumulated the weight of centuries of 
wrong. For the great mass of the English poor is 
nothing but the continuation of the race of villeins 
or slaves, whose servitude to the baron has been 
exchanged for dependence on the parish and subor- 
dination to the powers of society scarcely less de- 
grading. The emancipated serf had lived a life of 
thoughtless and hopeless dependence, without in- 
structed prudence or trained forethought, in the 
midst of those who contemned his weakness and his 
low estate. In times of pervading ignorance, and 
when society was too unskilled and unthrifty to pro- 
tect itself against constantly recurring famine, he 
had received the form of personal freedom, but not 



69 

its power. And thus the vices and sensuality of a 
thousand years, and the essential evil out of which 
they grew, descending and reappearing in some vari- 
ety but substantial identity, age by age, linger long- 
est and will die out the latest in that class of men 
rendered comparatively worthless by servitude. 

But even they have illustrated the recuperative 
energy of human nature, — the power of moral agen- 
cies and awakened intelligence to renew and restore. 
I cannot but give honor to the social reformers, 
preaching the truths of nature and her science, for 
the deliverance of the suffering poor, and I give 
honor also to that very class of weary and depressed 
laborers, for their response. The degradation of 
circumstances has yielded already. Theirs never 
was a voluntary depravity which elected drunkenness 
for the mere love of gin, and accepted misery for 
the sake of the bowl. As social science advances, 
as society itself leads, so they will continue to fol- 
low. They may yet be brutish, yea, and drunken 
too; but drunkenness will disappear as the light 
shines in on the darkened intellect, as opportunity 
develops manhood, as hope visits and encourages the 
heart. 

Crime and tippling are so linked together, that if 
we could banish tippling, the judges have a thousand 



70 

times declared that crime, unable J;o live alone, 
would follow too. But crime is already going. The 
influences of which I speak have already diminished 
crime, by striking at the common causes of crime 
and drunkenness both. The population of England 
and Wales in 1849, is given in the "Statesman's 
Year Book" at 17,552,000, and in 1863, (or fourteen 
years later,) at 20,554,137 — an increase of a little 
more than three millions. But the number of con- 
victions for crime in the same period descended from 
21,001 to 15,799, — a diminution of criminal offend- 
ers of 5,202, or a little less than twenty-five per 
cent. In other words, while in 1849 the number of 
criminal offenders was in the proportion of one in 
835 of the aggregate population, in 1863 the frac- 
tion had fallen to one in 1,300. The average num- 
ber of children attending school had more than 
doubled. Similar, though less striking results, ap- 
pear in Scotland. And in Ireland, the apparent 
diminution of criminal offence is so remarkable and 
unprecedented, that while something must perhaps 
be allowed to improvement in police and judicial or- 
ganization, I am confident that the social history of 
the island is a still more brilliant example' of the 
powerful moral effect produced by the material and 
educational advancement of a people. 



71 

Less than three years ago, John Bright, the great 
political and social reformer, in a speech opposing 
in the House of Commons a bill for more restrictive 
treatment of the sale of alcoholic beverages, bears 
his own testimony to the progress made in those 
classes most accessible to moral influence and the 
motive of ideas : — 

"lam old enough to remember, when among those classes with 
which we are more familiar than with the working people, drunk- 
enness was ten or twenty times more common than it is at present. 
I have been in this House twenty j^ears, and during that time I 
have often partaken of the hospitality of various members of the 
House, and I must confess that during the whole of those twenty 
years, I have no recollection of having seen one single person, at 
any gentleman's table, who has been in the condition which would 
be at all fairly described by sa3 T ing that he was drunk. And I may 
say more, — that I do not recollect more than two or three occa- 
sions during that time, in which I have observed * * * that any 
gentleman had taken so much as to impair his judgment. 

" That is not the state of things which prevailed in this country 
fifty or sixty years ago. "We know, therefore, as respects this 
class of person, — who can always obtain as much of these per- 
nicious articles as they desire to have, because price to them is no 
object, — that temperance has made great way ; and if it were pos- 
sible now to make all classes in this country as temperate as those 
of whom I have just spoken, we should be amongst the very soberest 
nations of the earth." 

If I am asked to account for the disappearance of 
drunkenness among the more favored classes, I 
appeal to the same cause which has purified litera- 
ture, ameliorated the criminal code, banished torture 



72 

and religious persecution, wrought out " Catholic 
emancipation," extended the ballot, established 
" model houses " and " ragged schools," encouraged 
innocent amusements, cultivated music and the arts, 
dismissed the barbarity of duelling, descended with 
Howard and Elizabeth Fry into the prisons, has 
flown with Florence Nightingale to the battle-field, 
and penetrated the various abodes where " lonely 
want retires to die," into all the wretched retreats of 
misery, and all the dungeons where society exacts 
the penalty of crime. I appeal to the same universal 
spirit and the same unerring law which renders it 
"more blessed to give than to receive." Intelli- 
gence, a higher, purer, more liberal culture, wider 
views and more knowledge, and all the material and 
scientific, as well as moral characteristics of modern 
civilization have combined to make the Englishman 
more w brave, tender and true ; " therefore more a 
gentleman of self-respect and refined manners, as 
well as a man more reverent of the divine image seen 
in all our common human nature. Could Plantage- 
nets, Tudors and Stuarts, wielding despotic powers; 
could the sovereign pontiff fulminating the professed 
decrees of heaven, and denouncing the- terrors of 
hell; could all their powers combined, their earthly 
penalties and eternal pains, have accomplished this 



73 

moral regeneration? Jfo, gentlemen, you know 
they could not have done it. As the Apostle taught 
of the Early Church, so true philosophy declares of 
the secular corporation of human society ; that ive 
are one body and members one of another. The same 
God who revealed something more than was yet 
known of the laws of the natural universe to one, 
taught cunning inventions in mechanism to another, 
spread out the broad pages and unfolded the sealed 
books of human history to another, and uncovered 
to another the mysteries of this throbbing heart and 
this scheming brain, has in like manner inspired 
others with loftier ideas of Right, and anointed their 
eyes with clearer visions of Duty. All these have 
become leaders of the people, and co-operators in 
the great social regeneration. 

The same phenomena have been manifested on 
our own side of the Atlantic. Like causes here 
have in like manner purified, softened, refined the 
habits of social life at home, And the excesses of 
gluttony and drunkenness which used to mar the 
festivities of former times have, so far as I have ever 
been a witness, and as the proof shows, disap- 
peared. But there has never been on earth any 
human governmental power which could have 
brought it to pass. The law possesses absolutely 



no reforming power. It can punish, can terrify, 
hold in forcible restraint. It cannot convert nor 
can it touch the springs of feeling or of thought. 
Unconvinced, untouched, unconverted, do you sup- 
pose the ingenuity and the armies of the world 
could have devised a statute and concentrated a 
force which could have dominated personal habits 
in those spheres of society, and have made any 
permanent and pervading impression on social con- 
duct and private maimers? 

Drunkenness was naturally one of the forms 
which vice assumed in New England. So far as it 
depended on the mere fact of opportunity for 
indulgence, it was partly due to our nearness to 
the West Indies, and to the trade by which our 
lumber was exchanged for their molasses. The 
peculiar product of our distillation was the result 
of the lumber trade with the West India Islands, 
just as the production of whiskey is now the result 
of the superabundant grain crops of the Western 
States. A hard climate, much exposure, little 
variety in food, and great want of culinary skill, 
few amusements, the absence of light cheering 
beverages, a sense of care and responsibility culti- 
vated intensely, and the prevalence of ascetic and 
gloomy theories of life, duty and Providence — 



75 

have, in time past, all combined to increase the 
perils of the people from the seductive narcotic. 
A man whose virtue was weak, or whose discour- 
agements were great, or whose burdens were 
heavy, or in whom the spirit waged unequal war 
with the allurements of the flesh; or even one in 
whom a certain native gayety strove with the un- 
welcome exactions of the elders, was often easily 
its victim. Independence, intelligence, self-respect, 
broader views, kinder and tenderer sympathies, the 
cultivation of the finer tastes, the love and appre- 
ciation of beauty, a truer humanity — not to speak 
of better social theories — all made more general 
and pervading in our society — have gradually by 
divine favor been made instrumental in the deliver- 
ance of our people from that bondage. I have not 
mentioned a greater conscientiousness in the cat- 
alogue of causes, for I do not believe that conscien- 
tiousness has ever been greater than in New Eng- 
land, nor that it is greater now than it was in other 
times. It was a characteristic of ~New England 
from the first. It was always a source of greatness 
in her people. But it has been often morbid and 
even superstitious. 

The evil of drunkenness needed to be met by a 
gracious Gospel kindling the heart, not by a crush- 



76 

ing sense of guilt goading the conscience. The 
temperance reformation sprung up out of the heart 
of a deeply moved humanity. It was truly and 
genuinely a Gospel work. It was a mission of love 
and hope. And the power with which it wrought 
was the evidence of its inspiration. While it held 
fast by its original simplicity, while it pleaded, with 
the self-forgetfulness of Gospel disciple ship, and 
sought out with the generosity of an all-embracing 
charity, while it twined itself around the heart- 
strings and quietly persuaded the erring, or with an 
honest boldness rebuked without anger — it was 
strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, 
verifying the prophecy of old, that one might chase 
a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight. But 
when it passed out of the hands of its Evangelists 
and passed into the hands of the centurions and 
the hirelings; when it became a part of the capital 
of political speculation, and went into the jugglery 
of the caucus; when men voted to lay abstinence 
as a burden on their neighbors, while they felt no 
duty of such abstinence themselves, (even under 
the laws of their own creation) ; when the Gospel, 
the Christian Church and the ministers of religion 
were yoked to the car of a political triumph; then 
it became the victim of one of the most ancient 



77 

and most dangerous of all the delusions of his- 
tory. 

Mr. Frederick Hill, an English barrister, and 
formerly " Inspector of Prisons," in a work published 
in London in 1853, discussed in a spirit of intelligent 
philanthropy the topic of "Crime: its Amount, 
Causes and Remedies " He declares his belief, " as 
the result of many years of inquiry and observa- 
tion," that crime " is steadily decreasing and taking 
a milder and milder form ; " and that this decrease 
is not only positive but comparative ; so that not- 
withstanding the increased wealth and population, 
" and estimating the extent of crime by the average 
amount of privation, fear and suffering which it 
causes to each member of society, the decrease is 
great indeed." 

He classifies the "chief causes" of crime thus : 
" 1. Bad training and ignorance. 2. Drunkenness 
and other kinds of profligacy. 3. Poverty. 4. 
Habits of violating the laws, engendered by the 
creation of artificial offences. 5. Other measures of 
legislation interfering unnecessarily in private ac- 
tions or presenting examples of injustice. 6. Temp- 
tations to crime caused by the probability of escape 
or subjection to insufficient punishment." 

Two of these are very suggestive. Artificial 



78 

Offences, and Meddlesome Legislation, and that felt 
to be unjust, are indeed causes of crime of which 
the philosophical legislator cannot afford to be igno- 
rant. Artificial offences put a large class of people, 
and often that the least discriminating and in- 
structed, into needless antagonism with the law. 
Confounding of moral distinctions on the side of the 
law, begets a corresponding confusion in the mind of 
the citizen. If the law treats the sale of a mug of 
beer, or sweet cider, as of like delinquency with the 
crime of larceny, how long will it take the humble 
and the unlearned to conclude that the law is either a 
sham, unworthy of veneration, or else to jump to the 
converse of the first proposition, and vote the lar- 
ceny of an article to be no worse than the selling of 
the beer or the cider? So, therefore, every statute 
denouncing the penalties of the criminal law against 
men, in violation of the commonly received sense of 
justice concerning human relations in the civil state, 
becomes, by reason of that very excess, a generator 
of evil. The laws under which men are punishable, 
can have no moral value unless the appeal can also 
be made to the consciences of men ; challenging them 
boldly to the confession of the apostle, " Wherefore 
the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and 
just, and good." 



79 

But, I pray your attention now to the first three 
in the category of causes of crime: Ignorance and 
had training — Drunkenness and other kinds of 
profligacy — Poverty. And when you shall have 
seen, (what all investigation proves,) how few ever 
fall into the criminal class, who have had the advan- 
tages of the simplest elements of learning — the 
acquisition of the power to read and write well 
their own tongue; who have even been taught any 
trade involving skill; and who have enjoyed immu- 
nity from the miseries of poverty; you then will see 
how drunkenness itself yields to motive and encour- 
agement. 

Against the common notion that the poorer 
classes commit fewer penal offences when they are 
straitened by seasons of unusual poverty, than they 
do when they are not so poor as to be unable to get 
drink, Mr. Hill opposes the result of his wide obser- 
vation as Inspector of Prisons. Against this opin- 
ion Mr. Hill sets w tlie general fact that, in periods of 
prosperity, our [their'] prisons are comparatively 
empty" The truth was undoubtedly just this — and 
it is undoubtedly true here as in England — the 
ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken and forlorn, are 
also drunken. 

But, do you urge that if you can maintain your 



80 

statute of prohibition, you will remove the temptation 
of drunkenness out of their way — gaining thus 
much, at least; and that, besides, you will gain a 
better chance to attack ignorance and poverty with 
success? I reply that if men were simply intelligent 
machines there might be something in your plan. 
The error in your plan is that you allow nothing for 
the human will, nothing for the elasticity and enter- 
prise with which it accommodates itself to new exi- 
gencies, whenever you challenge a direct combat 
between the law on the one hand and the purpose of 
even the humblest of the people on the other hand. 
The denunciations of positive law, unsustained by a 
successful appeal to the prevailing sense of right 
and justice are little else than a trumpet-call to 
battle. Let the effort be the prohibition of a dan- 
gerous but seductive beverage, and let the period be 
a dark age, or let the manners of the time be gener- 
ally gross and coarse, or let the amusements of the 
people be few and their intelligence low, or let there 
be a class of underfed and dejected laborers, or 
beggars — and the effect will be as disastrous as the 
experience of England in 1737, of Sweden long ago, 
and of Scotland. Both McCulloch in his book on 
" Taxation," and Porter in his w Progress of the 
Nation," have portrayed the failure of the English 



81 

experiment. The reaction was both swift and irre- 
sistible. 

In the " charges " of Recorder Hill of Birming- 
ham, whose long and earnest devotion to the 
removal of drunkenness entitles him to universal 
gratitude, we find a discussion of English prohibi- 
tion. He affirms that "the impediments thrown in 
the way of the venders of alcoholic drinks, partly 
by the imposition of duties on the manufacture or 
importation of the article, and partly by the system 
of licenses, had diminished, or at all events kept in 
check the consumption of intoxicating liquors. We 
need, gentlemen, no statistics to prove to us, that 
the state of the country in 1830, was much better 
in regard to temperance than it was a century before 
that period." But the philanthropic Recorder utters 
one sentence in describing the fate of the legislation 
of 1737, [which was the same statute alluded to in 
the testimony of Mr. Derby,] which (coming from a 
judge, in whose heart both the idea of liberty, and 
the sentiment of humanity had alike a share,) is an 
emphatic admonition to ourselves. It is in these 
very words : u And doubtless It could only have been 
success/id among a people, who to the sensuality and 
ignorance of the English populace should have added 
the slavish obedience of the Russian serf" 



82 

In Sweden, notwithstanding the laws against 
intoxication, rigorously enforced, and those forbid- 
ding the gift or the sale of spirituous liquors to 
workmen, servants, soldiers, minors, &c, the distil- 
lation by the people in their own houses carried up 
the production of spirits to an annual average of 
ten gallons for each inhabitant. In Scotland, we 
are informed by the Temperance Prize-Essay of 
Doct. Lees, that in the second century, Argadus, 
the administrator of the realm, pulled down the 
houses of the sellers of strong drink, confiscated 
their goods and banished the men; that in the ninth 
century Constantine II. added the punishment of 
death to the taverners who resisted the decree; that 
in the sixteenth century, although there were no 
public taverns known, the citizens brewed their own 
ale, "their usual drink," and they entertained the 
travellers; that in just one hundred years later, 
multitudes of drunken beggars infested Scotland, 
and in plentiful years, robbed poor people living 
remote from neighbors, and used to meet in the 
mountains feasting and rioting for days together, 
and that on all public occasions they were found, 
both men and women, " perpetually drunk." The 
sheriff of Lanarkshire, Mr. Allison, testified* in 

* Porter's Progress of the Nation, p. 679. 



fc3 

1838, that at every tenth house in Glasgow spirits 
were sold, and that the whiskey drank in Glasgow 
was probably twice or thrice as much as in any 
similar population on the globe. 

The report by the Secretary of the Board of 
State Charities of Massachusetts, just printed (cov- 
ering the year 1866,) declares in these emphatic 
words: " It is notorious that the great mass of crim- 
inals is made up of the poor, the ill-taught, the ill- 
conditioned, and, in a double sense, the unfortunate" 

" The proportion in the Commonwealth of those 
who cannot read and write, among persons capable 
of crime, is between six and seven per cent., while 
the proportion of criminals who cannot read and 
write, for the last ten years, has been between 
thirty and forty per cent., or more than five times as 
great" 

"Out of 11,2)0 prisoners, only 4:19, or less than 
one in twenty-five, are reported as ever having owned 
the value of $1,000." 

The Secretary mentions that 7,313, or about two- 
thirds of this number, are set down as intemperate, 
which he deems too low an estimate. 

Those figures show that the social law 1 have so 
often affirmed, holds good in Massachusetts, and up 
to the present time. It is from " the poor, the ill- 



84: 

taught, the ill-conditioned, and in a double sense, 
the unfortunate," that the ranks of pauperism and 
insanity, and crime and drunkenness, are yearly 
reinforced. It is true that the Secretary speaks of 
drunkenness as the " chief occasion of crime." 
And that it is connected or associated with crime, 
being one of the symptoms of the same disease of 
which crime is another, one of the manifestations of 
social degradation, one of the proximate causes too 
of many an oifence, is true. But — let me put a 
case which will illustrate the true relation of drink- 
ing to crime. A few years ago, a young man, not 
twenty years old, who had never been to school, nor 
to church, had never learned his letters, had never 
heard the blessed name of Jesus, save when pro- 
fanely uttered, urged by the desire of his wife for 
money, and goaded by her taunts, loaded his gun 
with powder and shot, and loaded himself with 
whiskey and gunpowder, and marched forth to the 
highway, and shot to death another man, (then trav- 
elling his rounds to deliver, as it happened, liquors 
to his country customers,) and robbed him on the 
spot. At his trial nearly all the witnesses, being 
residents of the same neighborhood, unable 4 to write 
their names, made their mark only, on the certificate- 
book of the officer. 



85 

I suppose this murder is reckoned among the 
crimes chargeable to drinking. And, perhaps, the 
mixture of whiskey and gunpowder which he drank, 
blunted his nerves and calmed his agitation, and thus 
fortified his audacity, to the extent of enabling him 
to do what would otherwise have been too much for 
him. "Without such drink, perhaps, and without a 
gun, certainly, he would never have shot his victim. 
But the purpose of violence and robbery was formed 
before he drank. The crime was sufficiently com- 
plete, as a purpose of the mind, without the draught. 
What made him a felon in the purpose of his heart? 
What degraded him into an ignorant heathen, living 
in the midst of a society where the fashions and cus- 
toms and desires of modern civilization serve to 
inflame the natural passions of those who are for- 
bidden to share in its opposing influences of refine- 
ment and religion? If you should urge the prohibi- 
tion of alcoholic drinks because of such an event, 
attributing the event to their having passed the lips 
of the felon — in one word, charging the murder to 
the whiskey — let me ask you what you would say 
about the thousand or thousands of the young men, 
who no doubt, drank on that same day, in the same 
county, and whose reputations are unspotted by 
offence? But — those young men, you will reply, 



86 

did not drink to madness, or inebriation. Then, it 
was not the use of the draught, but its abuse — vol- 
untary and wicked — which, logically, you ought to 
hold up to rebuke, and hold out as a warning. Nor 
is that all. There were many young men that very 
day, who drank when they ought to have abstained, 
who drank foolishly, dangerously, intemperately — 
but who otherwise committed no offence. Why 
were not they, too, felons, or at least peace-breakers? 
"Why did they not even overstep the bounds of ap- 
parent, public decorum? Because they had culture, 
means of high enjoyment, were restrained by fine 
influences and social happiness ; because they were 
not of u the poor, the ill-taught, the ill-conditioned, 
and in a double sense, the unfortunate." 

When you charge crime to drunkenness, as one of 
the frequent proximate causes of crime; and when 
you charge the sinking of many a man into deeper 
degradation, by abandoning hope, and abandoning 
himself to drinking as one of the seductive forms of 
sensuality, you are right. But much that I hear, 
leads me to dread the return to our Christian com- 
munity, of that pharisaic morality which substitutes 
a ritual conformity, in matters not essential in* nature 
nor by the divine law, for the heart of love and the 
embrace of charity. 



87 

The report of the Secretary, in 1861, avows the 
belief "that no less than three-fourths of what is 
technically called crime among us, is the direct 
result of poverty and its attendant evils." A year 
later, alluding to that remark, he adds, " I did not 
mean to be understood that mere lack of money is a 
potent cause of crime. There is a poverty which is 
honorable and conducive to virtue, just as there is an 
affluence which tends to the growth of every vice. 
But that degree of poverty which excludes educa- 
tion, which abases and finally destroys self-respect, 
which breeds disease, indolence and vice, is conspic- 
uous in every civilized country, and conspicuous as 
a curse. Of such did the wise man say, ' The 
destruction of the poor is their poverty.'" 

M. Dupuy, the Director of the French prisons, in 
his report for 1863, exhibits a diagram showing that, 
for twenty years, crime against property in France 
has risen and fallen with the price of grain. 

And it is a fact in remarkable confirmation of the 
theory of these gentlemen, that in our own Com- 
monwealth, crime diminished not only during the 
years of the rebellion, but was less during the very 
last year, ana has not at any time risen to the 
amount of detected crime existing before the war. 
The number of women committed in 1866, was ten 



88 

per cent, less, and the number of children twenty- 
five per cent, less, than in 18G5. Not even the flow 
of bad whiskey with which, on the evidence, the 
whole country is suffering a deluge, has been able to 
counteract the moral advantages to the humbler 
classes gained from the pay, bounties, state aid and 
high wages of the last few years. There was a con- 
stant accumulation of savings, all over the Common- 
wealth, among persons in humble life, which is 
evidence of increased comfort, sure to produce 
greater hopefulness and self-respect. 

Still does not poverty owe its own origin often- 
times to drunkenness? Undoubtedly, yes. So also 
is it due often to luxury and idleness originating in 
bad moral training, the sudden acquisition of un- 
earned wealth, leading to habits of self-indulgence 
degenerating into drunkenness and other vices. But, 
drunkenness in our own modern society, ending in 
either pauperism or crime, in one of good training, 
grounded in reasonable intelligence, with the means 
of comfort, and supported by the inspirations of hope, 
is a rare and exceptional phenomenon. Drunken- 
ness is, however, one of several causes immediately 
generating crime and pauperism — the reduction of 
which to the minimum, is one of the studies and aims 
of civilization. Yet, the effort to reduce them by a 



89 

war on the material abused to produce drunkenness 
is scarcely less philosophical, than would be an at- 
tempt to prevent idleness and luxury, by abolishing 
property and imitating the legislation of Sparta. 

I aver that a statute of prohibition, aiming to ban- 
ish from the table of an American citizen by pains 
and penalties, an article of diet, which a large body 
of the people believe to be legitimate, which the law 
does not even pretend to exclude from the category 
of commercial articles, which in every nation, and in 
some form in all history, has held its place among the 
necessities or the luxuries of society, is absurdly weak, 
or else it is fatal to any liberty. Whenever it will 
cease to be absurdly weak, society by the operation 
of moral causes, will have reached a point where it 
will have become useless; or else it will be fatal to 
any liberty, since, if not useless, but operated and ful- 
filled by legal force, its execution will be perpetrated 
upon a body of subjects in whose abject characters 
there will be combined the essential qualities which 
are needful to cowardice and servility. 

Do you tell me, that no beverage into which alcohol 
enters, used in cooking, or placed upon the table, fitly 
belongs to the catalogue of foods? 

I answer: That is a question of science, which 
neither governor nor legislature has any lawful ca- 
pacity to solve for the people. 



90 

Do you tell me, then, that whether the catalogue 
be expurgated or not, all such food is unwholesome 
and unfit to be safely taken? 

I answer: That is a question of dietetics. And it 
is for the profession of medicine. There is, in prin- 
ciple, no odds between proscribing an article of diet 
and prescribing a dose of physic, by authority of law. 
The next step will be to provide for the taking of 
calomel, antimony and Epsom salts by Act of the 
General Court. 

Do you tell me, however, that all such beverages, 
in their most innocent use, involve a certain danger; 
tjjat possibly any one may, probably many, and cer- 
tainly some will, abuse it, and thus abuse them- 
selves ; and by consequence that all men, as matter 
of prudence, and therefore of duty, ought to abstain 
from and reicct it. 

I answei . That is a question of morals, for the 
answer to which we must resort to the Bible, or to 
the Church, or to the teachings of moral philosophy. 
The right to answer it at all, or to pretend to any 
opinion upon it, binding the citizen, has never been 
committed by the people, in any free government on 
earth, to the decision of the secular power.' If the 
State can pass between the citizen and his Church, 
his Bible, his Conscience and God, upon questions of 



91 

his own personal habits, and decide what he shall do, 
on merely moral grounds, then it has authority to 
invade the domain of thought, as well as of private 
life, and prescribe bounds to freedom of conscience. 
There is no barrier, in principle, where the government 
must stop, short of the establishment of a State 
Church, prescribed by law, and maintained by perse- 
cution. 

Do you tell me that the using of wine or beer as a 
beverage, however temperately, is of dangerous ten- 
dency, by reason of its example? Do you insist 
that the temperate use of it by one man may be 
pleaded by another as the occasion and apology for 
its abuse? 

I answer: that if the government restrains the one 
man of his own just, rational liberty to regulate his 
private conduct and affairs, in matters innocent in 
themselves, wherein he offends not against peace, 
public decorum, good order, nor the personal rights 
of any, then the government both usurps undele- 
gated powers, and assumes to punish one man in 
advance for the possible fault of another. The ar- 
gument that, because one man may offend, another 
must be restrained, is the lowest foundation of 
tyranny, the corner-stone of despotism. Liberty is 
never denied to the people anywhere, on the ground 



92 

that liberty is denied to be good or right, in itself. 
The universal pretext of every despotism is, that 
liberty is dangerous to society, — that is, that the 
people are unfit to enjoy it. J 

Do you tell me that these arguments have a ten- 
dency indirectly to encourage and defend useless and 
harmful drinking, and that silence would have been 
better — for the sake of a great and holy cause? 

I answer : that He who governs the universe and 
created the nature of man, who made freedom a ne- 
cessity of his development, and the capacity to choose 
between good and evil the crowning dignity of his 
reason, knew better than to trust it to the expedients 
of political society. The great and holy cause of 
emancipation from vice and moral bondage, is moral, 
and not political. 

It used to be thought right to burn a man's body 
for the salvation of his soul. It used to be thought 
that to suppress heresy and false teachers deceiving 
the people, was mercy to the heretic and the false 
teacher themselves, while it protected the people 
against perversion and spiritual ruin. The motive 
was not bad, but the philosophy was fatal. The 
better the motive, the sincerer the men, -the 'more dis- 
astrous was the policy. So now, if dishonest and 
despotic men alone, from love of power and not of 



93 

human welfare, should appeal to this machinery, to 
work, against men's wills, their moral renovation, the 
plan would lose more than half its danger. But 
the bad precedents good men establish to-day, in the 
weakness of their faith in better means, had men use 
to-morrow for bad purposes and with worse motives. 
Meanwhile, aiming at compulsory conformity to your 
creed of artificial virtue, the dissentients, even if sub- 
missive, regarding themselves merely as the victims 
of a dominant asceticism, are made deaf to moral 
teachings, impatient of the preacher, haters of his 
doctrine, and defiant at heart. 

Gentlemen, I maintain the positions I have assumed, 
and enforce them by arguments, because I believe 
those positions to be true, and the arguments sound. 
I believe it is safe, expedient and wise to stand by 
the truth. If the Catholic priest, uttering the united 
voice of all the bishops and minor clergy of the prin- 
cipal ecclesiastical body in Christendom [see testi- 
mony of Rev. James A. Healey,] claims no power to 
declare that to be a sin, which Almighty God has not 
made to be a sin, neither can Protestant minister nor 
popular convention. But, I cannot stand in the atti- 
tude of defence. If the doctrine is true; if the teach- 
ings of science are so ; if the argument is sound, then 
I charge back upon all those who, in the spirit of 



94: 

Jesuitical philosophy would sacrifice the truth, science 
and argument, to a supposed moral expediency, that 
they — in the service of morality — are unsettling its 
foundations in the confidence of men. 

Do you suppose that the adherents of the Roman 
Catholic Church, or the many thousands of other 
persuasions, whose opinions have been declared by 
the reverend and learned men, belonging to Protest- 
ant denominations, who have denied before this 
Committee the moral validity of the theory of prohi- 
bition, will accept the dogmas of a Protestant Pope, 
although indorsed by a self-created convention, or 
enacted by a secular government? Do you suppose 
that the people of every class and persuasion, — 
taught by professors and practitioners of medical 
science of every school to take wines and beer as 
tonics, and restoratives, and as part of their diet, in 
illness, in age, or on occasions of physical depression 
— will, in their hearts, believe your declaration that 
they are essentially and characteristically poisonous? 
Do you think that the children at our firesides will 
believe that the apostle, (in the unworthy phrase of 
modern discussion,) was a " rummy " and a perverter, 
when, instead of commanding total abstiiience, he 
enjoined freedom from excess of wine? Do you 
imagine they will forget, that he who made the best 



95 

wine which the guests enjoyed at the marriage feast 
in Galilee, (because He came " eating and drinking " 
while John the Baptist was a Nazarite and drank no 
wine,) was aspersed by the Jewish Pharisees as a 
u wine-bihber and a friend of publicans and sinners"? 

The people and the children are not blind to the 
inconsistencies and sophistries of those who claim 
to lead them. They can distinguish the truths of 
the Gospel, and the practical dictates of Reason, 
from the controversial theories of " contentious 
conscientiousness." 

I have a few words to say on the statistics. Many 
gentlemen called by the remonstrants, gave opinions 
based on the presumed existence of facts which, if 
not known to exist, can afford no ground of opinion. 
If known, they could have been proved, by reference 
to the ordinary means of statistical information. 
For the purpose of aiding the Committee to arrive 
at the truth, we brought the evidence of such gentle- 
men to the test of cross-examination; in every 
instance showing that their opinions, whenever they 
seemed at first to have been deductions from such 
facts, were in reality, at best, only the guesses of 
honest, but pre-occupied judgments. Now there 
was one gentleman whose fame in statistics, in phi- 
lanthropy and in medicine, had led to his employment 



96 

by the national government to prepare the volume of 
''- Mortality " in the series of volumes containing the 
results of the census of 1860 — I mean Dr. Edward 
Jar vis. An ardent opponent of all " ardent spirits," 
he would have been for the remonstrants the safest 
possible witness, had the truth been trustworthy. 
He was the best witness for them to have called, had 
they only desired the best evidence. Besides, I had 
alluded to his wort, in my cross-examinations. 
And on the last day of their testimony, one of the 
most intelligent and fair-minded of their witnesses, 
when pressed in cross-examination by the facts 
shown in the statistics of Dr. Jarvis's volume, 
repeatedly called in question the reliability of the 
census reports. The Doctor, (who knew better 
than anybody else,) was in the presence of the 
Committee during the larger part of the sitting. 
He had also been in the hall, with the witnesses, 
through the whole day on Wednesday, and several 
times before. I had early notified the remonstrants 
that I desired, should they call him to the stand, to 
have it done when present myself.j 

They used up Wednesday, and they used up 
Friday; (Thursday I was absent in court;) but 
Dr. Jarvis was kept silent, while very important 
things were put in proof. At last, five minutes 



97 

after the time of the sitting had been exhausted, 
and the chairman had declared an adjournment, Dr. 
Jarvis was called by Rev. Dr. Miner to the stand, 
and the special favor granted, of ten minutes for him 
to make a statement. He read some passages 
from the French treatise of M. Morel, on the 
" Degeneresccnces de l'Espece Humaine," about the 
evil effects — exhibited in sterility, impotence, in- 
sanity, idiotcy, and the like — of the "abuse" of alco- 
hol, and what Morel scientifically terms, "chronic 
alcoholism," — touching all which there is no dispute. 
He then produced and put into the case some tab- 
ular matter, not read by us, nor to us; when the 
necessity of clearing the hall for the sitting of the 
House itself, ended the testimony. Nor was any 
opportunity possible for cross-examination. I 
have no idea that Dr. Jarvis desires anything but 
the truth, of which he is an earnest, toilsome in- 
vestigator, with an enthusiasm for a dry mass of 
figures, which he is always willing to trust, " hit 
where it will." The remonstrants had seemed, on 
the record, to have called Dr. Jarvis, and they had 
seemed to have got us into the position of voluntarily 
omitting to cross-examine. But what Dr. Jarvis 
had to say as a statistician, no one was enabled 
either to hear or to read. I made no complaint at 



98 

the time. I knew that if I should object to the al- 
lowance of the ten minutes, it would seem ungracious 
to a venerable and learned man, and perhaps be 
otherwise misconceived. Besides, I thought then 
(and so I think now) that the remonstrants, by 
their stroke of apparent finesse, when fully under- 
stood, would only gain a loss. 

When we depart from the simplicity of truth as it 
is found in nature, in the lives of the great exemplars 
of our race, and in revealed religion, and go to hew- 
ing out for ourselves the broken cisterns of merely 
human ingenuity, we are not unlikely to tend to run 
the experiment into palpable extremes, and to try it 
too often. 

Let me add : in regard to Morel, it appears that 
his dissertation on " chronic alcoholism " is founded 
on observation of two hundred cases, and that, of 
these, thirty-five were cases in which the ungovern- 
able appetite for excess was caused by disease.* 

Of the sheets handed in from Doctor Jarvis, I am 
obliged to confess that it has been impossible yet 
fully to explore their figures or even to decipher 
them. Yet two or three points may be discussed. 

Among the reasons urged why Massachusetts 

♦Traite des Degenerescences, physiques, intellectuelles et morales de 
'Espece Humaine, par le Docteur B. A. Morel. Paris, 1857,. p. 132. 



99 

should resort to methods which belong to " military 
necessity " rather than civil administration, is, in sub- 
stance, though not in form, the averment of the exist- 
ence of such a necessity. This is a convenient plea, 
often just, but sometimes abused, even in war; never 
justifiable in peace, and when no overwhelming and 
sudden exigency of convulsion, fire, flood, or pestilence 
returns society to its original rights, which organized 
government may, on those supreme occasions, be un- 
able to vindicate under the forms of regular proced- 
ure. Among the proofs of such a necessity to trans- 
cend the sphere of legislation, break down the 
precedents, and disregard the principles of liberty, 
(as they have been understood by men of English 
blood, ever since the Revolution of 16^8,) is the al- 
leged fact of a desperate and frightful mass of insan- 
ity, existing in this country and occasioned by drink. 
Doctor Jarvis is an especial expert in the cure of 
insanity, as well as in the study of its phenomena, 
and its literature. On one of his sheets is a table 
"of patients admitted into hospitals for the insane, 
caused by intemperance." This table states that, 01 
all the patients received into all the hospitals in the 
United States down to 1856, the causes of their dis- 
ease as reported are known in 14,935 cases. The 
cause of the insanity of 1,536 is reported to have 



100 

been " intemperance." That number is the aggregate 
of known alcoholic insanity, out of all the aggregate 
population existing during a series of years running 
from 1833 to 1856, and that too, making no allow- 
ance for recommittals of the same persons, who must 
in some instances be enumerated twice. It gives a 
gross ratio of 1,028 cases of "insanity caused by in- 
temperance," out of each 10,000 reported cases. Now, 
let us compare this result with the figures given on 
the same page, showing the experience of the differ- 
ent hospitals and different sections of country rela- 
tively to each other. I do this for the purpose of 
learning whether in those parts of the country where 
prohibitory legislation prevails, any apparent diminu- 
tion of this kind of insanity has arisen. Also, I do 
it to learn whether in those parts where liquors are 
plenty and cheap, this insanity is proportionally in- 
creased, by the tables. Also, to test the accuracy of 
the reasoning of the physicians, the friends of pa- 
tients and others, to whom we are indebted for the 
statements in the individual cases assigning the in- 
sanity of patients to this cause. I say the " reasoning" 
because, while I do not deny their truthfulness, I am 
not so sure of their accuracy in correctly discriminat- 
ing between apparent causes and real ones, between 
causes immediate and causes remote. 



101 

JReinember that the grand ratio in the Union, by 
these statistics, is 1,028 to 10,000 — a trifle over one 
in ten. Bat, in Ohio, (whence came a witness for 
the remonstrants, to say how much his people longed 
for the legislation of Maine and Massachusetts, and 
New England generally, against the sale of alcohol- 
ics,) Dr. Jarvis's table shows only 505 out of 10,000, 
or a trifle less than one-half the average ratio of in- 
temperate insanity in the country. Compare the 
State of Ohio with Massachusetts. The returns for 
Boston, Dr. Jarvis's table gives as showing 2,318 
out of 10,000, or more than twice the average ratio 
of the Union; Northampton Hospital, 2,168, Taun- 
ton Hospital, 2,379, and Worcester Hospital vibrat- 
ing at different periods from 1,1 10, up to 1,832. Go 
to Philadelphia, and the ratio found in the whole 
period returned is 1,183. The highest ratio there 
was from the years 1855 to 1866, when it was at the 
rate of 1,310 to the 10,000. The average ratio of all 
the Pennsylvania Hospitals is 1,064 to the 10,003; 
while Harrisburg Hospital presents a ratio of only 
547 to the 10,000. 

This table then proves, if it proves anything at all, 
that " insanity from intemperance," as it is returned, 
prevails more in the very head-quarters of prohibitory 
legislation and principles, than it does in the whiskey 



102 

region of the West and the North- West, where, 
before the war-tax, whiskey could have been bought 
at the distilleries for a quarter of a dollar the gallon, 
and where also the manufacture of wine from the 
native grape has grown to be an important business 
of the people, and " prohibition " is known only by 
name. 

I will admit, however, that prohibition, as such, 
may be excluded from the argument. It has really 
existed in New England, only in name. And, it is 
fair to give the remonstrants the benefit of the fact 
in the argument. But it is true, that a large degree 
of abstinence, even to totality, has existed in New 
England, in fact, ever since these hospital records 
began to be made. How shall we account then for 
the fact, which the remonstrants have themselves 
thus proved, that Massachusetts, admitted to be so 
far ahead of Pennsylvania and Ohio, in technical or 
ritual temperance, suffers from twice to four times as 
much, from insanity caused by intemperance, as they 
do? I suppose the truth to be, that the real or pri- 
mary cause of much of the insanity of men falling 
into intemperate habits, and reported as made crazy 
by those habits, could be traced to anterior causes. 
These, distracting, breaking down, weakening and 
disheartening the man, in mind and body, left him 



103 

to topple over into drunkenness, in which condition 
he first disclosed occasion for anxiety to his friends, 
and from which, by the rapid development of the 
undiscerned, though earlier, malady, he descended 
rapidly into some form of positive, visible insanity, 
of which drunkenness, as the last antecedent, became 
the apparent cause. On this point I might content 
myself with merely citing the testimony of Dr. Morel 
himself in his very treatise * which was quoted by 
Dr. Jarvis on other points. By means of drinking, 
it became known, for the first time, that the patient 
was crazy at all. And, this was the true history of 
the tragic case of one of the most brilliant men, by 
nature, I have ever known. But how does this 
theory account for the phenomenon of apparently 
drunken insanity here, in excess of such insanity 
there? My answer is, that from the causes I have 
already indicated, there is more insanity, in the 
aggregate, among our people, in proportion to num- 

* Traite des Degenerescences, etc., by Dr. Morel, page 133, note ; where 
the learned author says : " Les debuts de l'alienateon mentale offrent une 
telle complexity, qu'il est bien difficile aux parents de se fixer sur l'influ- 
ence principale sous laquelle se developpe le mal. II arrive bien souvent 
que telle cause qu'ils regardent comme efficiente, n'est souvent qu'un effet 
secondaire." 

" The beginnings of mental alienation present such complexity that it is 
extremely difficult even for relatives of the patient to make sure of the 
principal influence under which^the malady develops. It often occurs that 
what they regard as the efficient cause, is in reality only a secondary 
effect." 



104 

bers, than there is in the other sections. And the 
mistake being often made, of supposing drink to be 
its cause, where, in a large class of cases, it is 
rather the antecedent than the cause, we are, there- 
fore, reported to have twice as much mental disease 
created by drink, when in fact we consume very 
much less drink to create it. 

Let me give a further proof. The whole number 
of deaths recorded as caused by " Insanity," occur- 
ring in the years 1859, '60, found in the volume on 
"Mortality" prepared by Dr. Jarvis himself, and 
printed by order of Congress, was 452 in all the 
States. There were other insane persons who died, 
but whose deaths were immediately caused by other 
diseases superinduced. But of those who died from 
insanity, the proportion was twice as great in the 
north-eastern as in the north-western districts, twice 
as great as in the south-west, more than twice as 
great as in the south-east, and more than twice as 
great as in the tier of States comprising Ohio, Indi- 
ana, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas, and a great deal 
larger than in other districts, except in California, 
It is plain, therefore, that insanity is a disease, 
which, in its various manifestations, appears in larger 
ratio, and is fatal to more people, in the north-east, 
than in most other portions of the country. The 



105 

excess in California is truly ascribed by Dr. Jarvis 
(on page 243 of the Census Volume of " Mor- 
tality,") to "the excitement and oppressive anxieties, 
and the great and sudden changes of fortune 
among many of the people." Applying the same 
rule to the north-east, we find the cause of our 
greater ratio of insanity, in the commercial fortuities, 
the speculative adventures, the hurrying, crowded, 
excited, anxious habits of manufacturing and com- 
mercial cities, the excessive nervous exposure of 
artists, poets, lawyers, and all persons of overtasked 
brains, distinguishing our civilization. Insanity, 
indeed, is peculiarly " a feature of developing civil- 
ization." * It is thus described by our own Board of 
State Charities, and with learned emphasis. Besides, 
the bad sanitary condition of narrow lanes and 
alleys, where certain classes abide and die before 
their time, among the denser populations, piles up 
another agony in the accumulation of human woe, of 
which madness is one of the mysterious signs. Thus 
our sum total of insanity is relatively greater than, 
for example, that of the "West. But this excess of our 
own insanity compared with population, furnishes 
no reason why the peculiar form of madness inci- 

* Second Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, 
p. ciii. (Mass. Pub. Doc. 1865, No. 19.) 



106 

dent to drunkenness should be still further increased 
and be twice as common in proportion to our whole 
volume of insanity. But, if this appearance is not 
merely superficial; if it is real; and if in Massachu- 
setts, in fact, more than twice as many people go 
mad from drink as in other places known to be less 
abstinent, I leave the unexplained phenomenon to be 
disposed of by others. I believe the explanation to 
be, (and these statistics concur in proving it,) that 
drunkenness is oftentimes a manifestation of inde- 
pendently existing mania, mistaken, by superficial 
observation, for the cause. 

These leaves of Dr. Jarvis have still further value. 
They confirm, by the weight of his opinion, the 
tables of mortality in the Census. It had been 
contended on behalf of the remonstrants, that such 
returns could deserve little trust; that the deaths 
from "delirium tremens" and from "intemperance," 
and from "insanity," as returned and tabulated, 
could not be true. But Dr. Jarvis himself exhibits 
now just such tables, which can be drawn only from 
such sources. It had been gravely urged by one of 
the strongest and most intelligent of their witnesses, 
that the mortality from intemperance was fifty thou- 
sand a year in the United "States! And, when I 
called attention to the proof, that the deaths from 



107 

" delirium tremens " were in 1S60 but 575, that those 
from " intemperance " were returned as 931 in all, 
that the mortality from " diseases of the brain " 
(regarded by their own physiological authorities as 
the great seat of the diseases generated by alcohol,) 
was returned at only 5,726 in the aggregate, and 
when I vainly begged to know how the estimate of 
the witness was made, my facts and figures were 
received with incredulity. Now the whole sum of 
mortality in the whole country, from all causes, was 
less than 374,000 in 1860, of which number by the 
theory of the witness in question, about one in seven 
was due to drink. But, one of the leaves presented 
by Dr. Jarvis, on the stand, shows that, even in 
Boston, (bad as she is represented by the prohibi- 
tionists,) in the dark decade from the year 1820 to 
1830, the mortality was but 309 from intemperance, 
to 10,000 of all known causes, or about three deaths 
from intemperance, out of 100 from all causes. And 
it also exhibits a descent, during the last five and 
forty years, from even that ratio, until during the 
fifteen years ending with the year 1865, there was a 
ratio of 85.9 to the 10,000, or less than one to one 
hundred. And this is Boston, bearing as she must, 
not only the sins of her own people, but of strangers, 
of a large mass of entirely exceptional persons, 



108 

dying under exceptional circumstances, and not rep- 
resenting at all the average health or the general 
sobriety. 

In Lowell, Dr. Jarvis's tables show that in the 
decade ending with 1851, the mortality from intem- 
perance was but 56.9 to the 10,000 deaths, or little 
more than half of one to an hundred ; and that, as in 
Boston, so there also, without enforcing prohibition, 
but by the moral self-restraint of the people, that 
species of mortality has still further diminished and 
has for the past fifteen years, been at less than half 
the former ratio, or about one-quarter of one death 
from intemperance to one hundred deaths from all 
causes. The same tables show, that taking all the 
counties but Suffolk, out of 81,473 deaths from all 
known causes, during the years 1861 to 1864, there 
were 298 from intemperance, or the ratio of 36.5 to 
the 10,000, less than four-tenths of one to the hun- 
dred deaths. And the seven counties of Barnstable, 
Berkshire, Franklin, Hampshire, Hampden, Dukes 
and Nantucket, from an aggregate of 113 deaths 
from intemperance, in the decade of 1841 to 1850, 
out of 24,681 from all known causes, fell down, in 
the next decade, to 123 deaths from intemperance, 
out of 39,991 from all causes. The former decade 
gave 45.8 to the 10,000, and the latter but 30.7 to 
the 10,000. 



109 

And all this proof of the conquering power ot 
ideas, of reason and moral sentiment, to reform 
abuses, has accumulated during a time when the use 
is more general, and when the cause of true temper- 
ance is demoralized by a law on the statute book, 
constantly defied. 

Accidents in 18G0, from the discharge of fire-arms 
alone, destroyed 741 lives; railway accidents, 599; 
accidental poison, 950; while the aggregate of acci- 
dental causes was fatal to 18,090 persons, an army 
corps in number. Even " old age," which is intended 
to include only those who die from exhaustion of 
vital force from protracted use of life, without any 
disease or organic lesion — attended 4,899 men and 
5,988 women, or 10,S87 in all, to the last repose of 
our poor humanity. 

Figures may be thought to be apparently in favor 
of the health and sobriety ot the country populations 
as against the city. But it should be observed that 
the progress of sobriety has been as great in the city 
as in the country, notwithstanding the exceptional 
disadvantages of crowded quarters and floating 
classes. 

I must afford time forgone proof that the great 
body of young and middle-aged men in Boston, in 
spite of all the supposed temptations of the metrop- 



110 

olis, are not behind their rural neighbors in the phys- 
ical qualities of manhood. Of the 29,194 men 
drafted by the United States in the summer of 1863, 
and of the 9,830 who volunteered under the stimulus 
of high bounties and the short term of service, dur- 
ing the last eight months of the war, being 39,024 
in all, there were rejected by the surgeons, 14,827. 
These two bodies are fairly representative — the first 
because raised on an equal draft, the second because 
stimulated by the same enthusiasms, and by State 
and town bounties, both large and similar. (No cal- 
culation covering the aggregate volume of physical 
examinations and the results, in this Commonwealth 
during the whole war, is accessible.) 

The number of these men, drafted or recruited and 
examined, in the two representative districts to which 
Boston belongs, (viz.: the third and fourth,) was 
12,74i, and the number in the other eight districts was 
26,283. Of those examined in the two Boston dis- 
tricts, the number rejected by the surgeons was 
3,916, or 310 to each thousand examined; while, of 
those examined in the other eight districts, the rejec- 
tions were 19,881, or 414 to each thousand, — thus 
exhibiting about three-fourths as many rejections to 
the thousand in the Boston districts as are found in 
the residue of the Commonwealth. 



Ill 

Mr. Chairman: The proof is clear that neither 
mortality nor insanity, nor any of the fatal exhibitions 
of intemperance, bad as they are, afford any ground 
for panic, or "military necessity in legislation." Bat 
one of the advocates before this Committee, and many 
of the witnesses, have declared they meant " to put 
it tlirougli" to " overcome obstacles," to " remember 
that Massachusetts can do whatever she undertakes." 
Another advocate, perhaps the most eloquent of them 
all, and not the least imprudent, has declared in pub- 
lic, that they intend " to exhaust the ingenuity of the 
Yankee mind '' in devising measures to compel the 
due subordination of their opponents. 

But, if gentlemen believe that a standing menace, 
a perpetual sneer, the denial of sincerity or conscien- 
tiousness, the [positive accusation of being moved by 
appetite, or by gain, the habitual affectation of supe- 
riority, both of rights and of character (with which 
these petitioners, their advocates and witnesses have 
been met and opposed by persons on the stand and 
off of it, by public speech, and through the " prohibi- 
tory " press,) will ultimately avail, when the results 
of this hearing shall have been spread before " the 
Yankee mind " — they have misconceived its intelli- 
gence and its fairness, the spirit of liberty, refine- 
ment and progress. 



112 

Whenever you begin this work of enforced con- 
formity, there are perils in your way little imagined. 
It is of no use to beg the question, by the short 
method of stigmatizing opponents as criminals, or as 
upholders of criminality. There is now proved to 
be — what certain gentlemen affected to doubt before 
— a powerful, convinced, intellectual, revered and 
noble body of people, numerically strong, and not 
surpassed by any, in aught that yields weight, dignity 
and influence, denying the dogmas of the prohibi- 
tionists, challenging the philosophy of their move- 
ment, the fitness of their methods, their consistency 
with liberty, with progress, and with the ultimate 
good. A denunciatory harangue, impugning the 
character of a private citizen, or the motives of a 
sworn and responsible magistrate, will not longer 
avail against this array. If, against the judgment of 
the best men you insist on this coercion, and trample 
on convictions as well as rights, let me remind you 
that the same argument of necessity may be used to 
strike where now you little dream. Stay a moment. 
Take this very illustration of insanity again. The 
census report 45 " gives a table prepared by Dr. Butler, 
of the " Hartford Retreat," exhibiting the • whole 

* See " Introduction/' to Volume on " Population," of the Census Re- 
port, of 1860, p. lxxxix. 



113 

number of cases in four leading hospitals, in which 
the causes of insanity have been noted. There were 
7,591 cases, in all. Of these, 2,253 were due to "ill 
health," and 812 to "intemperance." Thus there 
was found nearly three times as much statistical 
proof of a necessity to take under guardianship the 
whole course of domestic life and personal habit, 
physical and moral, for the protection of the com- 
munity against suffering from the madness of sick 
people, as against that of the other class. ISTor is 
that all. If "intemperance" caused the madness of 
812, so " religious excitement" came next in the order, 
and crazed 740 more. What will you do with these? 
You admit that you have no right to restrain or 
appoint the use of stimulants by the citizen. He 
may use them in his diet, as well as for his medicine, 
if he can. But you will prevent his getting them, by 
forbidding any one to sell them, unless as a public 
agent. And you will direct the public agent to make 
inquisition of the use intended, and to refuse them 
if wanted for a dietetic purpose. Thus, by indirec- 
tion, — not deemed honorable as between gentlemen, 
not deemed Mr dealing as between merchants, not 
jDermitted by the Grospel, which enjoins that your 
"yea" shall mean yea, and your "nay" shall mean 
nay, — your law aims to do, and its supporters make 

8 



114 

a virtue of trying to do, what it purports to omit, 
what it pretends to avoid. It, in fact, undertakes to 
get into the household, control the domestic economy 
and the diet of the citizen, by a sumptuary law art- 
fully worded. The supreme court may not be able 
to reach and overrule it. But, there is " a higher 
law," by which it is inevitably rejudged. 

If the legislature can do thus, then why not also 
lay hands on the promoters of " religious excite- 
ment? " Do you reply that people have the right to 
think according to conscience, on religion? True; 
and so you say they have a right to select their own 
diet. Suppose you compare the number of people 
made crazy by " religious excitement " with the num- 
ber of sinners returned as converted, and on compar- 
ing them you find the ratio of that insanity greater 
than the ratio alcoholic insanity bears to the aggre- 
gate of temperate drinkers, what is to hinder the 
application of your argument from " military neces- 
sity?" Why not admit the right to think, but deny 
to some classes the dangerous right to preach? Does 
the constitution hinder? Then why not try " the in- 
genuity of the Yankee mind/' by agitating to amend 
the constitution, to rid us of such an evil? Some of 
the denominations might not object, if they are not 
wedded to the idea of liberty. It might be found 



115 

that the confessional, the absolution, and the sacra- 
ments of salvation, offered by the Church of Rome, 
give such peace of mind that its ministers prevent 
insanity and create none. It might be urged that 
the denominations styled " Liberal " neither alarm 
nor console, and therefore, if they do no good, do no 
harm. It might be set up that Calvinism distracts 
the understanding, scares the imagination, and leaves 
an awful doubt forever hanging over the tremendous 
problem of election and reprobation; that Arminian- 
ism is exciting, noisy, and guilty of placing an over- 
whelming responsibility on the sinner's mind, since it 
leaves everlasting issues to depend on his working 
out his own salvation. Romanism, then, together 
with the " Liberals," might be left by the law in sub- 
stantially undisputed possession of the field — as the 
" State agency " appointed to preach down insanity 
and lower the taxes now wrung from our pockets to 
support 740 people a year driven mad by religious 
emotions and measures which they could not " as- 
similate " nor " digest." 

But, suppose, for the moment, that our part of the 
immense trade in alcoholics, — of which ninety mil- 
lion gallons were manufactured in this country in 
I860, — could be taken by legislative machinery out 
of commerce and put into politics, so that the gov- 



11(5 

ernor, or his agent, the liquor commissioner, should 
be the only lawful wholesale dealer, besides the 
importers selling only their original packages, which 
could never be broken for sale, nor sold again, unless 
by the commissioner. And, for all the myriad uses 
of our diversified industry into which alcohol enters, 
(as it does enter in almost every conceivable way 
through manufactures and the arts, being found at 
last in solid, as well as fluid forms, in our lights, in 
the gases, and in most medicines, at some stage or 
other of their preparation,) suppose for the moment 
that only the local agents of the government should 
actually sell it by retail at all. Remember, that 
there is an actual demand in the whole country, by 
the public taste, good and bad, for at least forty mil- 
lion gallons to drink. Alongside of this demand, in 
ordinary times, there is, with our present population 
and under wise taxation, a demand for some fifty 
million gallons more for other uses agreed to be 
legitimate. When politics have got the monopoly 
of the latter business, they will not wait long before 
grasping at the former. The business, (for ends 
acknowledged legitimate,) will then have swollen in 
the hands of the commissioner and his friends, — who 
manufacture and import for him, who sell or consign 
to him, to whom he is indebted, or under obligations, 



117 

— to the proportions of a vast overshadowing monop- 
oly, of which the profits would belong to a few, rep- 
resented in every hamlet, on every hillside and river 
bank of Massachusetts, by an army of local agents in 
correspondence and in fatal relations with the " head 
centre " of the monopoly at Boston, who would " pull 
the wires " felt in every town and district caucus, 
and would " log-roll " with every similar enterprise 
aimed at the subversion of local and personal inde- 
pendence. Strong in the power of such a gigantic 
" machine " invented in a spasm of " Yankee inge- 
nuity," impudent with ill-gotten wealth, and bloated 
by greedy ambition, — like the two daughters of the 
horse-leech, (in the Proverbs) they will perpetually 
cry "give! give!" Do you believe in the virtuous 
self-denial of such an unnatural alliance between 
trade and politics, consummated in defiance of the 
principles of political economy, maintained by sub- 
verting ancient safeguards of liberty; created by a 
statute which — professed to be made in the interest 
of a high moral testimony against the sale of even 
wines not less than spirits distilled — allows the man- 
ufacture of New England Rum by the wholesale, 
to be sent abroad to all the earth, and among our 
missionaries to the heathen, without hindrance or 
rebuke? 



118 

T warn honest gentlemen, who desire that the 
traffic in these dangerous and seductive, yet needful 
and indispensable liquids, shall be kept within the 
reach of regulation, wherever order and decorum 
demand the intervention of government, and the 
government can rightly intervene, — I warn them 
that your machinery may be found, at last, more 
powerful than the inventors. You may yet find, 
that after political corruption shall have subsidized 
the party leaders, and demoralized the party, dedi- 
cated by its name, and consecrated by its life to 
Republican liberty, it will reveal itself in all the 
hideous proportions of the Devil, though now wear- 
ing a shining robe. I forewarn you of the day 
surely coming, unless you recede, when the mo- 
nopoly you are striving to create, greedy for more 
gain and more power, anxious to increase and not 
to diminish its sales, w T ill " run the machine " in the 
interest of unlimited consumption by our own people, 
as well as by the heathen. When that day comes, 
it will be found that your machinery, the motive 
power of which will be a stream of Rum, swollen by 
all the affluents of commerce, will have a wheel large 
enough for the stream, and that the whole* stream 
will be turned on the wheel. I pray you to avoid 
trying the fatal experiment to see whether in that 



119 

day, and until a new revolution shall break the chain 
you are now forging, Massachusetts will own the 
Trade in Rum, or the Monopolists of the Trade 
will own Massachusetts, selling what they please, as 
they please, to whom they please, limiting their busi- 
ness only by the fatality of their beverages. The 
only safety of " the machine " is found in the fact 
that it never will be made to work. 

We propose, Mr. Chairman, a scheme which will 
liberate the Commonwealth, and give scope to the 
religious and virtuous encouragement, whether of 
Temperance or of Abstinence. Enact a law leaving 
the wholesale liquor trade with commerce, where it 
belongs. Provide for assay and inspection, to pro- 
tect the people from imposition. If you can allow 
men to distil liquors for wholesale, for the uses of 
arts and manufactures, as now you do, there is no 
pretext for interference with the product of impor- 
tation. Permit the municipalities to license tav- 
ern ers to furnish to their guests, in their rooms, or 
on their tables with their meals, whatever beverages, 
as well as whatever meat, they demand and the mar- 
kets afford, according to the customs of social and 
domestic life. Allow them also to license victuallers 
to sell fermented beverages in like manner, with 
the meals of their guests, and allow grocers to retail 



120 

in packages conveniently small for domestic or cul- 
inary use, and for employment in manufactures and 
the arts; and, in the name of ordinary fairness and 
common reason, grant the petition of the College 
of Pharmacy? 

Having adopted a scheme which looks to the dis- 
continuance of public tippling places, or saloons, or 
bars, of all kinds, surround the licensees by such 
police regulations as may be> to restrain that abuse. 
Your regulation of the retail trade will then securely 
repose on the clear social right to maintain order 
and public decorum, endangered by bar-rooms and 
tippling shops, where dangerous and seductive bev- 
erages are offered neither as medieine, nor as diet, 
to the chance crowds of the hour, tempted by each 

other to drink without appetite, to linger without 
motive, and to revel without enjoyment, 

" Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind, 
Nor words a language, nor even men mankind." 

t 

If you fear that local influences may indulge indi- 
viduals at the risk of the public, then give to the 
judges of the Court of Probate and of the Superior 
Court, sitting in Chambers, jurisdiction on summary 
hearing, upon sworn complaint of any selectman or 
alderman, or of the Constable of the Commonwealth, 
to annul any license which the municipal authorities 



121 

refuse to annul, on proof to the judge's satisfaction 
that its holder has broken the law or the conditions 
of his license. 

Do this fairly, with no effort to reduce the people 
to inconvenient straits in the pursuit of what in their 
own judgment they need. 

Under the forms of republican legislation, do not, 
in the short-sighted service of morality without 
Faith, seek to play either the tyrant or the peda- 
gogue. 

[n the words of John Quincy Adams, whose aus- 
tere virtue and greatness made him for years the 
representative statesman of 'New England, uttered 
in addressing the Temperance Society of Norfolk 
County, five and twenty years ago : — 

" Forget not \_I pray you] the rigftts of personal freedom. * * * 
Self-government is the foundation of all our political and social 
institutions, and it is by self-government alone that the law of tem- 
perance can be enforced. * * * Seek not to enforce upon 
[your brother,] by legislative enactment, that virtue which he can 
possess only by the dictate of his own conscience and the energy 
of his own will." 

Abiding by such principles, you will put an end to 
the antagonism between the government, and the 
people who consume. You will have preserved your 
own dignity, undertaken your own duties, and 
recognized their rights. With all the methods and 



122 

forces of the present laws, and of the existing 
decisions, at your own command for the punishment 
of those sell who without license, or in breach of one, 
you will stand in a position a hundred-fold stronger 
than you do to-day, or than you ever stood before. 

Recognizing the retail trade in liquors as having 
an exceptional side, and therefore requiring a certain 
police supervision which every town may not desire 
to undertake, we do not ask it to be forced upon any 
town against its will. While the means of purchase 
for certain uses are furnished through the agency, 
and while the competition of other towns exists, and 
the power to institute the same competition exists 
there also, a given town may prefer to exclude it. 
The fatal monopoly I have described will then be im- 
possible; and the right of the citizen will be pre- 
served to buy somewhere in the Commonwealth those 
things he needs, in his own judgment, for his family 
and for himself. 

It is puerile to inveigh against this plan, as making 
the " criminal laws of the Commonwealth " subject to 
municipal interference. That is substituting an ad- 
jective for an argument. These laws are only 
u criminal " because they are made so, or called so. 
They are properly police regulations (often essen- 
tially municipal,) concerning the distribution of cer- 



123 

tain articles of merchandise, universally admitted to 
have their proper uses, needful to be bought and sold, 
but liable to abuse. One breaking those regulations 
is liable to indictment or complaint. In that sense, 
they are criminal laws. But, there always have 
been other laws, the violation of which subjects 
one to criminal procedure, as for misdemeanor, just 
as these do, which are subordinated to municipal 
administration, and which even owe their very being 
to the will of the respective cities and towns. 

But, do you profess that these prohibitory laws 
were enacted in the exercise of your best discretion; 
and that in your judgment the case for a change has 
not been made out? I then beg to meet that position 
by the counter position taken by some of the ablest 
and wisest men in Massachusetts, in testimony before 
this Committee, denying the right of government thus 
to pass into the domestic and private sphere. 

If there is a man born to speak the English 
tongue, who combines high integrity, great attain- 
ments, practical wisdom and theoretical statesman- 
ship, with faith in, and devotion to, free government, 
and the elevation of the humble, that man — one of 
the truest friends of America in the Old World — is 
John Stuart Mill. And thus he wrote: — 

" There are. in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty 



124 



of private life actually practised, and still greater ones threatened, 
with some expectation of success ; and opinions proposed which 
assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law- 
eveiything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it 
thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to 
be innocent. 

" Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people of one 
English colony, and of nearly half the United States, have been 
interdicted by law from making any use whatever of fermented 
drinks, except for medical purposes ; for prohibition of their sale 
is in fact, as it is intended to be, prohibition of their use. * * * 
The infringement complained of is not on the liberty of the seller, 
but on that of the buyer and consumer ; since the State might just 
as well forbid him to drink wine, as purposely make it impossible 
for him to obtain it. The secretary, however, [of the English 
4 Alliance '] says, ' I claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate when- 
ever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another.' 
And now for the definition of these ' social rights.' ' If anything 
invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. 
It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating 
and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, 
by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery I am taxed to 
support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual devel- 
opment, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening 
and demoralizing society, from which I have a right to claim mu- 
tual aid and intercourse.' A theory of * social rights,' the like of 
which probably never before found its way into distinct language, 
being nothing short of this, that it is the absolute social right of 
every individual that every other individual shall act in every re- 
spect exactly as he ought ; that whosoever fails thereof in the 
smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to 
demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So 
monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single inter- 
ference with liberty ; there is no violation of libert}' which it would 
not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, 
except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever 
disclosing them." * 

* Mill on Liberty pp. 170-73. 



125 

I appeal also to "William von Humboldt, the friend 
of Schiller and of Goethe, a statesman, a scholar, an 
ambassador of Prussia, a minister of State, who re- 
organized public instruction, and gave to the Prussian 
system much of the eminence it enjoys, whose forecast 
attempted to consolidate Germany against the first 
Napoleon, as Bismarck has, more than a half century 
later, consolidated it against Napoleon III., and of 
whom it was said by Talleyrand, that there were not 
three men in Europe of his ability : — 

"The Slate may content itself with exercising the most watch- 
ful vigil unce on every unlawful project, and defeating it before it 
has been put into execution ; or, advancing further, it may prohibit 
actions which are harmless in themselves, but which tempt to the 
commission of crime, or afford opportunities for resolving upon 
criminal actions. This latter policy, again, tends to encroach on 
the liberty of the citizens ; manifests a distrust on the part of the 
State which not only operates hurtluUy on the character of the cit- 
izens, but goes to defeat the veiy end in view * * * All that 
the State ma}' do, without frustrating its own end, and without en- 
croaching on the freedom of its citizens, is, therefore, restricted to 
the former course ; that is, the strictest surveillance of every trans- 
gression of the law, either already committed or only resolved on ; 
and as this cannot properly be called preventing the causes of 
ciime, I think I may safely assert that this prevention of criminal 
actions is wholly foreign to the State's proper sphere of activity." * 

One of the latest and best expositions of the " Ra- 
tionale of Government and Legislation" is found in 

* Sphere and Duties of Government (W. v. Humboldt,) p. 171. 



12'5 

a recent volume bearing that title, by Lord Wrottes- 
ley, in which, without pretension to novelty of rea- 
soning, (which would, perhaps, be a demerit,) he has 
presented the results arrived at by the best modern 
writers on the philosophy of government. 

The following propositions so clearly express the 
conclusions of reason and experience, that I am pre- 
pared to adopt and to proclaim them as the voice of 
authority. 

"Fiist. Laws should never be passed which either cannot be 
executed, or of which the execution is so difficult that the tempta- 
tion to neglect their observance is likely to surmount the fear of 
the punishment. 

'' Second. Laws should never be passed forbidding acts which, 
in the opinion of a large proportion of the educated members of 
the community, are in themselves innocent. 

u Third. Laws should not generally be passed which, though 
good in themselves, either too much anticipate public opinion, or 
are hostile to the deliberately-formed sentiments of a large major- 
ity of the population of any country. 

" Fourth, No attempt should be made to reform the moral con- 
duct of society by the enactments of positive law, — that is, to 
make men good and virtuous by Act of Parliament." 

The venerable and reverend Doctor Leonard With- 
ington, in the dawn of this attempt at enforced con- 
formity, sounded the note of remonstrance, with 
prophetic wisdom. 

"I desire to bear my solemn testimony, and to say that though 
I have seen frequent attempts, I never knew any good to come from 



127 



such legislation. I have seen men exasperated by it, but never 
reformed So it ever has been, and so it ever will be, until nature 
itself is changed. I was in Connecticut when attempts were made 
to enforce the observance of the Sabbath by law. I saw hypocris} 7 , 
power, passion, haughtiness, indignation, force, resistance, com- 
mands, threats, cursing ; but I saw no promotion of meekness 
among Christians or repentance among sinners The contest was 
long, and the fruits were bitter. Long did it take to teach the 
sober part of the community a simple truth. What the law could 
not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending hi*> own 
Son in the likeness of sin fid flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the 
flesh, that the righteousyiess of the law might be fulfilled in us who 
walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit" 

w ' If any person can devise a plan for prohibitory legislation on 
the sale of intoxicating drinks, not involving the greatest incon- 
sistency even in the very scheme, then I will acknowledge he has 
clone what surpasses the utmost flights of my imagination. This 
very plan must be a square wheel made to roll. But how absurd 
it is to expect success in the execution, when you cannot even 
devise consistenc} 7 in the design ! You launch a vessel full of holes 
and expect her not to sink." 

" Remember that some are drunkards because they are poor ; 
some because they are idle ; some because they are disappointed ; 
some because they are ignorant ; some from an unhappy nervous 
system ; and all because they are not Christians. Reflect that there 
are indirect as well as direct efforts to oppose this evil ; and that 
sometimes the indirect efforts are the most effectual. Is a man 
idle, endeavor to employ him ; is he ignorant, instruct him ; is he 
disappointed, point him to the true source of consolation ; and, 
above all things, beware how you lord it over his faults, or play the 
Pharisee over his vices. Recollect that intemperance is seldom an 
insulated vice ; it grows up in wide combinations ; and you are 
never fitted to engage in the subject of reforming it until you have 
sounded the depths from which it springs." 

It is urged by many good men that spirits and 



128 

wines are so alluring, that health and morals require 
teetotalism as the only safeguard. That while there 
is evidence, by which many men otherwise trust- 
worthy are convinced, in favor of a certain, temper- 
ate, dietetic use by some people, yet the moral dangers 
to the mass are such that teetotalism ought not only to 
be universally volunteered, but that it ought to receive 
the vindication of the Statute book, and the moral 
support of the legislature. 

The whole argument involves one of the oldest ot 
the human errors; so entirely human that it has no 
shadow of countenance from the religion of the New 
Testament. This world, in which while in the body 
we must abide, and this body in which the spirit 
dwells, have been felt by- many philosophers and 
moralists, both Christian and heathen, to work a sad 
imprisonment of the celestial spirit. ,The immaculate 
purity of the spirit, soiled by any indulgence of the 
gross and material body, recedes from all human 
passion, and oftentimes from all intercourse with thi 
tempting, dangerous, material world, to which alone, 
in the temptation of a simple fruit, hanging on one 
of the trees of Eden, is due our whole experience of 
woe and the awful mystery of evil. The Church has 
always been tolerant, the Church of Rome has some- 
times been too indulgent, of this mysticism; while 



/ . 



329 

some of the Protestant sects, as well as of the socie- 
ties in the Roman Church, have made it their vital 
principle. But it had its original expression in ori- 
ental philosophy, not in Christianity, nor even in 
Judaism. 

When our Saviour came to the Jews, He found 
them mainly in these sects or divisions, — the Phar- 
sees and the Sadducees. The latter, relatively small, 
maintained the law as written by Moses, denying the 
traditions of the Eiders. They were rich, educated 
and influential, but cold, hard and unspiritual. The 
Pharisees were devoted to their religion, professed to 
live meanly, to despise delicacies, to venerate the 
Elders. But many of them, with ostentatious 
prayers, sacrificed the heart of humanity on the altar 
of ceremonious and hollow sanctity. Besides these, 
were the Essenes. They were very few, and were 
sincere, but narrow. 

Doubtless recruited from the sect of Pharisees 
they held rather to their general views, which had an 
ascetic tendency. But, in a spirit of devout, self- 
denying, mystic yearning after God, they sought 
him in the ecstasies of contemplation, through exile, 
poverty and want; instead of facing the world, bear- 
ing its social burdens, risking its evils, temptations 
and woes. Although there were many observances 



130 

pertaining to the flesh, ritually imposed upon the 
Jew, including many dietetic limitations, there was 
in the law of Moses no prohibition against drinking 
wine — which was the intoxicating beverage of Pal- 
estine — save only the command to Aaron, and his 
posterity (the priesthood),* not to drink wine nor 
strong drink when going before the congregation, 
lest they might by accident put the clean for the un- 
clean in the holy sacrifice of the tabernacle. There 
were stringent laws to maintain the purity of woman, 
and of the family descent. But, there was no sug- 
gestion in the law of Moses of a peculiar sanctity in 
a celibate life. The Jew was educated to believe 
marriage honorable, and a fruitful posterity a pride 
and blessing. Bat, there were occasionally men and 
women who assumed the vow of a Nazarite, (which 
word implies separation,) "to separate themselves 
unto the Lord, * * * from wine and strong drink," 
to eat nothing " made of the vine tree, from the ker- 
nel even to the husk; " not to permit the hair nor the 
beard to be shorn, to touch no dead bodj", nor to 
make themselves ritually unclean, for father, mother, 
brother, or sister, " during the days of their separa- 
tion." f We read of a few persons devoted by their 

* Leviticus, chapter 10, v. 9, 10. 
f Numbers, chapter 6, v. 2-21. 



131 

parents for life, while yet unborn, to this separation. 
Samson was one. John the Baptist was another. 
He was sequestered from the world, living a monk- 
ish, or a hermit, life, according to the ascetic notions 
of the Essenes, refusing alike to marry, to drink 
wine, or to live in conformity with the social life of 
Palestine. 

Inspired by a sublime enthusiasm of prophecy, 
watching for the expected Messiah, (but unlike so 
many Jews, who looked for a conquering king, imag- 
ining Him as coming from Edom, with dyed gar- 
ments from Bozrah, glorious in his apparel, travelling 
in the greatness of his strength, having trodden the 
wine-press alone, now trampling the people in his 
anger,*) John, — stationed by the ford of Jordan, 
where the waters had divided before the ark, amid 
the rich vegetation and grateful shade of this spot 
of romantic beauty, where so often he is described 
in painting as surrounded by multitudes and perform- 
ing the initiatory rite of salvation, — recognized and 
proclaimed " the Lamb of God, who taketh away the 
sins of the World." 

The Messiah accepted the recognition and the 
baptism of John. But though He did this honor to 
the prophet, and accepted his emblem of the inward 

* Isaiah, chapter 63, v. 1-3. 



132 

purifying of the soul, and of the spiritual and celes- 
tial character of his own coming, (as contrasted with 
some fierce apparition of triumphant wrath,) the 
Saviour immediately made clear his own disagree- 
ment with the dogmas of the Essenes, and the notions 
of asceticism. 

Soon after his baptism, there was a marriage-feast. 
Invited to attend, He joined the festivity. In com- 
pliance with the wishes of his Mother, the wine hav- 
ing failed, Jesus, by miracle, changed water into 
wine, and sent it to the master of the feast. " Thus 
Jesus performed his first miracle at Cana, in Galilee, 
and manifested his glory." * By these two actions, 
of emphatic significance, — that is, by attending the 
marriage-feast and making the wine, — our Lord, with 
the utmost publicity, placed himself in unequivocal 
antagonism to the asceticism of Nazarite and Essene, 
prevented his baptism from being mistaken for any 
profession of adhesion to the sect, the dogmas, or the 
practices of John; sanctioned the domestic tie, which 
the Essene contemned; the use of the beverage, which 
the Nazarite rejected; and the friendly enjoyment of 
innocent festivity. 

On no other theory can we understand the mean- 
ing of his joining the feast, or working the miracle. 

* Gospel of St. John, chapter 2, v. 11. Norton's translation. 



133 

In the very hour of festivity, the dreadful future of 
his Passion was presented to his soul. He sympa- 
thized with the social joy of others; but He was sad 
himself. ]S~or can we regard the miracle as wrought, 
either to display his power, or simply for the hilarity 
of the feast. It would be to degrade the character 
of our Lord, and imagine motives to which He never 
yielded in the use of his heavenly gifts. If we per- 
ceive in his conduct the evident testimony He bore 
against opinions sincerely held by John, but of which 
He would not even seem to be the adherent, we shall 
better understand the spirit of the occasion, and the 
true character of our Lord, and we shall learn what 
Paul, the apostle, learned perhaps from the story of 
the same miracle, (while Peter needed its revelation 
in vision), that "The kingdom of God is not meat and 
drink" 

Had Jesus been accessible to ordinary motives, He 
would have adopted, or at least indulged, asceticism. 
It would have given Him a party at the beginning of 
His career. It would have helped Him to defy, or to 
puzzle, the Pharisees, and to turn their weapons. 
But He was absorbed in the infinite purpose of a 
mission which included all human nature, all times, 
all places, and all circumstances of men. 

When the great Apostle to the Gentiles was a 



13i 

prisoner in Rome, the Christians in Colosse, one of 
the Phrygian cities, sent Epaphras with messages of 
comfort to Paul. He returned home with " the Epistle 
to the Colossians " in reply. The Greeks had, long 
before the Gospel, introduced their philosophy into 
Asia Minor. And, in Phrygia, the doctrines of both 
Plato and Pythagoras found many disciples; against 
some of the opinions of both of whom the Epistle is 
in part directed. Besides these, were the teachings 
of Judaisers, endeavoring to impress upon the Chris- 
tians Mosaic observances.* In order to attract those 
Christians who had been Platonists or Pythagoreans, 
it is supposed that the Judaisers tried to convince 
them that those philosophers had themselves been 
taught by the writings of Moses. Thus, through 
Judaisers, of the strictly ritualistic, or formalist and 
purely pharisaic school, and through others of the 
Essene, or purely ascetic school, and through Pytha- 
goreans who carried out the doctrine of transmigra- 
tion of souls to the logical conclusion of rejecting 
the flesh of animals as food, the infant Christian church 
of Colosse was in peril of dogmatic demoralization. 
Here, Paul — like his Master in the beginning — 
turned his back upon the temptation so plainly set 
before him. He would not humor the peculiarities 
of any of these several schools, all of which, though 



135 

from different origins, might have been combined in 
a common end of giving some formal expression to a 
higher life, in which Greek reason, Oriental mysti- 
cism and Jewish reverence for a divinely given ritual, 
could have rallied around Christianity as a common 
centre. But the poor prisoner bound in Rome, 
would not compromise one iota of the simplicity and 
grandeur of that lofty Faith, whose deeper meanings 
and universal application none among the Apostles 
knew so well. Therefore he commanded his converts 
to avoid alike an empty philosophy, the traditions of 
men, and the elements of this world, which are not 
according to Christ. Abjuring the theories of the 
Greeks and the Orientalists, the rites of Moses, the 
intercession of angels, he warned them to let no 
man (whether Greek or Jew, Essene, Nazarite, or 
Pythagorean,) judge them in respect of meats or 
drinks; of partaking animal food, or of drinking 
wine, in the temperate repast of Christian liberty. * 
While the great Apostle was willing, — in tender- 
ness to a brother whose weakness demanded charity, 
— not to eat meat nor drink wine, if by eating or 
drinking he would lead to the misapprehension that he 
was recognizing idolatrous worship,f he placed that 

* See, among other authorities on this whole subject, " Milman's History 
of Christianity," and " MacKnight on the Epistles." 
f Romans, chapter 14. 



136 

willingness wholly on the ground of an affection- 
ate concession, not at all on any ground of any 
form of asceticism. Had it been proposed in the 
Christian church to establish asceticism by creed or 
discipline, it would have aroused the utmost power 
reposing in the mightiest pen ever held by human 
hand. 

It was left for Mohammed, as a measure of real 
" military necessity," by pretended revelation, to ful- 
minate an interdict. Christianity, the only Religion 
" which is not naturally weakened by civilization," 
which " has traversed the lapse of ages, acquiring a 
new strength and beauty with each advance of civil- 
ization, and infusing its beneficent influence into 
every sphere of thought and action," * omitted asceti- 
cism wholly from its plan. It has led the conquering 
march of humanity, under the inspiration of its 
Founder, in obedience to immortal hope and celestial 
love; subordinating passion and appetite, not by the 
law of a carnal commandment, but by the power of 
an endless life. The Gospel of Jesus, preached and 
testified by apostles, evangelists, confessors and 
martyrs, descends to no comparison with the Koran 
of Mohammed, whose sword, succeeded by the torch 

* "Kationalism in Europe," by W. E. H. Lecky Vol. i., pp. 311,312. 
(American edition.) 



137 

of Omar, led the hordes of Islam to the slaughter of 
the unbelievers. * 

* See, among other authorities, «' Mohammed eler Prophet," [Stuttgart, 
1843] by Gustav Weil, then assistant-librarian, since 1845 Professor of 
Oriental Languages in the University of Heidelberg. At page 140, the 
learned author says : — " The danger which Mohammed incurred from his 
followers addicting themselves to the use of wine, was probably the occa- 
sion of this prohibition." Also, " Essais sur Phistoire des Arabes," etc., 
[Paris, 1847,] by Armand Pierre Caussin cle Perceval, Professor of Arabic 
in the College of France, vol. iii , page 122, where he says :— £' According 
to the common opinion, it was during one of Mohammed's sieges in the 
territory of Medina, that he published the verses of the Koran which in- 
terdict wine and games of chance to the faithful " 

Frederick von Schlegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 
(Robertson's Translation, Bohn's edition, page 357,) suggests a second 
motive of Mohammed in making the prohibition. He says :— " Even the 
prohibition of wine was perhaps not so much intended for a moral precept, 
which, considered in that point of view, would be far too severe, as for 
answering a religious design of the founder; for he might hope that the 
express condemnation of a liquid which forms an essential element of the 
Christian sacrifice, would necessarily recoil on that sacrifice itself, and thus 
raiso an insuperable barrier between his creed and the religion of Christ.'* 
This motive of Mohammed receives corroboration from the fact of his 
desire to proselyte from among the Jews, and from the consideration, (to 
which, however, Schlegel does not refer,) that the prohibition was likely 
to be one not altogether unacceptable to Jews, by reason of its confirma- 
tion of the antithesis between the Hebrew religion and the Christian reli- 
gion on just this very point of the use of wine, — the only prohibition of 
its use by the Mosaic law being in connection with the religious rites of 
sacrifice, (Leviticus, c. 10, v. 9, 10.) (See also page 128 of this Argument.) 
Whereas it was precisely in the offering of the most significant Christian 
sacrament, (i. e., the Lord's Supper,) that its use was expressly ordained 
by Jesus, (Matthew, c. 26, v. 27. Mark, c. 14, v. 23.) And it is most re- 
markable, that while Moses forbade wine only to the priest, and then only 
when going " into the tabernacle of the congregation," Christianity en- 
joins the use of wine in the only sacrament which is universally adminis- 
tered at the altar and in the sanctuary. So deep is the Christian feelin? 
in this precise relation of its use to the ceremonies of our religion, that 
the sale of wine for sacramental purposes is the only kind of sale which, 
by our prohibitory law, is free to all persons, at all places, and on all 
occasions. 



138 

How much the Mohammedan interdict has been 
worth to the morality of Persia, (whatever was its 
value under military organization, on the march or in 
camp,) may be learned from the testimony of both 
travellers and missionaries : — 

" Prohibiting the use of wine to its followers, tends to restrict 
the manufacture to those places where the Jews, Americans, or 
Hindoos, form part of the population. But the Persians have 
always been less scrupulous observers of this precept of the Koran 
than the other Mussulmans ; and several of their kings, unable to 
resist the temptation, or conceiving themselves above the law, 
have set an example of drunkenness, which has been very generally 
followed by their subjects. * * * At present, many persons 
indulge secretly in wine and generally to intemperance ; as they 
can imagine no pleasure in its use, unless it produce the full delir- 
ium of intoxication. They flatter themselves, however, that they 
diminish the sin by drinking only such as is made by infidels. 
* * * The Jews and Americans prepare wine on purpose for the 
Mohammedans by adding lime, hemp and other ingredients, to in- 
crease its pungency and strength : for the wine that soonest intoxi- 
cates is accounted the best, and the lighter and more delicate kinds 
are held in no estimation among the adherents of the prophet." * 

Its moral influence on Turkey, I leave to the 
description of Lord Bacon, who styles Turkey — 

4 - A cruel Tyranny, bathed in the blood of their emperors upon 
every succession ; a heap of vassals and slaves ; no nobles, no 
gentlemen, no freemen, no inheritance of land, no stirp of ancient 
families ; a people that is without natural affection, and as the 

♦ 

* History of Ancient and Modern Wines. London, 1824. 

See, also, Travels in Georgia and Persia, by Sir R. Kerr Porter, Vol. i., 
p. 348. Voyages de Chardin, Tom. ii., p. 67. 

And, also, " Kight Years in Persia," by ltev Justin Perkins, (mission- 
ary,) pp. 226, 227, and 402. 



139 



scripture saith, that regardeth not the desires of women ; and with- 
out piety or care toward their children ; a nation without morality, 
without letters, arts or sciences ; that can scarce measure any acre 
of land or any hour of the clay ; base and sluttish in buildings, 
diet, and the like; and in a word, a very reproach of human 
society." * 

The influence of entire abstinence upon all the 
different Mohammedan nations and races, to the ex- 
tent the Mohammedan superstition has enforced it on 
the devout, I leave to the able writer of the article 
on " Food," in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 

" Many men, as the natives of Bengal and other countries, live 
entirely upon vegetables ; and others, as the Esquimaux, alto- 
gether upon animal food, while most examples of the human species 
use a mixed diet of animal and vegetable matter ; and the majority 
of people find it most convenient to obtain a portion of their sup - 
ply of carbon fiom fermented drinks, or from drinks distilled from 
such The number of people who abstain from fermented drinks, 
however, proves that the requisite amount of carbon may be obtained 
from saccharine or oleaginous compounds, the deficiency being in 
general, probably, made up from the latter. There appear*, nev- 
e>'thele*s, to be little doubt but that, in order to attain the full perfec- 
tion of the mental and bodily faculties, an admixture of animal and 
vegetable articles of food is essential ; and also that a portion of the 
carbonaceous supply should be derived, from alcohoHc drinks. Those 
who live almost entirely upon animal food become stunted in growth 
and liable to the ravages of scurvy, and their mental and moral 
faculties are blunted and sensual; those who consume only vege- 
tables are generally inactive and listless, and incapable of either 
active bodily or mental labor ; and independently of other objections, 
there is reason to fear that the off .spring of those icho abstain entirely 
from fermented drinks, become in a generation or tivi enervated in 
mind and bod'j. Tt i* probably in this last mentioned manner that 

*Lo)d Bacon's Works, ^Boston edition,) Vol. xiii., p. 198, "Touching a 
Holy War." 



14:0 

the decadence of the different Mohammedan nations and races is to be 
accounted for, at least in part." * 

If you could enforce the outward observance of 
apparent conformity on a cowering and hypocritical 
population of unwilling subjects, judge you, by the 
testimony of Dr. Clarke, and of the ministers of 
religion, who know full well the workings of this 
law in the secret places, the devastation you will 
carry in its train. I desire, above all things, to bring 
the evil to the surface. It is safer on the skin than 
at the heart or in the brain. And bad as is the un- 
guarded use of " rebellious liquors," it is safer — a 
hundred times safer — to bear with it, until it can be 
met by curing the inward disease of which drunken- 
ness is a manifestation, rather than to push the de- 
termined consumers of narcotics to the terrible alter- 
native of opium. 

Literature is full of testimonies against such legis- 
lation. You find them in essays, in speeches, in 
history, uttered by Cromwell, by Milton, by Burke, 
by Macaulay, and I know not how many besides. 
" Though you take from a covetous man all his 
treasure," says Milton, "lie has one jewel left, yet 
cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish 

* Encyclopaedia Brittanica, (8th edition) ; Article "Food;" subdivision 
" The Principles of Dietetics; vol. ix., p. 768. 



141 

all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the se- 
verest discipline that can be exercised in any her- 
mitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not 
thither so. * * * Look how much we expel of sin, 
so much we expel of virtue. * * * This justifies 
the high providence of God, who, though he com- 
mands us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours 
out before us even to profuseness, all desirable 
things. * * * Why should we then affect a rigor 
contrary to the manner of God and of Nature." * 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, I have spoken 
boldly, as one of the advocates of thirty thousand 
voters of Massachusetts, who, without noise or ob- 
servation, memorialized the General Court. Their 
opinions have been illustrated by more than one hun- 
dred witnesses, from all quarters of the Commonwealth. 
They are of nearly all professions and callings, men 
of learned pursuits and those devoted to the cares of 
busy life, scholars clergymen, and statesmen, cultiva- 
tors in the various sciences, and of wide renown, 

* See " Treasures from the Prose Writings of Milton," (by Ticknor & 
Fields,) passages from the " Areopagitica," the "Defence of the People of 
England," etc., pp. 112, 114, 115, 136, 158, and 345-6. 

Burke's Speeches, etc., (Little & Brown's Ed.,) Vol. v., pp. 163, 

164. 

Macaulay's History of England, 5th Vol., c. 23, p. 41. (Harper's 

octavo edition.) 



142 

men of venerable years, and those of younger age. 
They are of the metropolis, the interior, the moun- 
tains of Berkshire, the valley of the Connecticut, 
the shores of Essex, the Islands and the Cape. They 
represent every phase of industry, of philanthropy 
and of wisdom. You heard, at the beginning, the 
eminent gentlemen, my honored associate, [Hon 
Linus Child,] whose life-long devotion to whatever 
is best in morality, in patriotism and religion, has 
made him a fit exemplar for all younger men of gen- 
erous aspirations. When such as he have spoken, I 
might well have been content with silence. With a 
deep sense of the importance of this inquiry, and of 
the issue it involves, forgetting all things but the 
honor and welfare of our Commonwealth and her 
People, I dedicate this offering of gratitude and duty 
to the Future of Massachusetts. 



THE ERRORS OF PROHIBITION 



AN ARGUMENT 



DELIVERED IN THE 



REPRESENTATIVES' HALL, BOSTON, 



APRIL 3, 1867, 



BEEORE A 



JOINT SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE GENERAL 
COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



By JOHN A. ANDREW. 




BOSTON: 
A. BUTLER, 62 SUDBURY ST. 

1874- 




.^saS'^iS— > 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS £ 

027 279 782 1 



